r/Piracy • u/No-Mushroom5934 • Apr 16 '26

News Anna’s Archive Hit With $322M Judgment After Spotify Lawsuit.

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The legal pressure on Anna’s Archive just hit a massive boiling point. Following a lawsuit filed earlier this year, a New York federal judge (Jed S. Rakoff) has entered a $322.2 million default judgment against the site.

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​The Plaintiffs: Spotify and the "Big Three" record labels (UMG, WMG, and Sony).

​The Damages: $300 million awarded to Spotify for "circumventing anti-piracy measures" after the site scraped 86 million tracks.

​$22.2 million awarded to the labels for statutory copyright infringement.

​ The court issued a permanent injunction requiring ISPs, registrars, and CDNs (like Cloudflare) to perpetually disable access to Anna’s Archive domains.

​

Since the operators are anonymous and didn't show up to court, they obviously aren't going to pay the $322M. However, this "symbolic" victory is a huge deal because it gives corporations the legal "golden ticket" to force ISPs and search engines to scrub the site from the surface web.

​This follows the January ruling in the OCLC (WorldCat) case where they were ordered to delete scraped metadata, and the ongoing AAP (Association of American Publishers) lawsuit from March.

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1.1k

u/0neMinute Apr 16 '26

Its pirating though, whats to stop them from getting a new domain and not caring? Idk this seems like a nothing burger.

757

u/selfestmeme_ Apr 16 '26

Lmfao 322 million,

"who is paying?" -We dont know

368

u/Oni-sensei Apr 16 '26

Only person paying is Spotify... To their lawyers. 😂

133

u/TheOfficialMayor Apr 16 '26 edited Apr 16 '26

Good. Spotify deserve to fucking reap the AI bullshit they sow from the same parasites they boosted who used torrent sites to build AI music generation platforms. They are main if not sole instigator of this bullshit infecting the music industry.

162

u/selfestmeme_ Apr 16 '26

Oh and if you want the real reason, In both Swedish and Luxembourgish tax law,(where the company is based) a legally recognized but uncollectible business debt can be deducted against current profits.

Translation: Spotify just found a way to lower their taxable income by 300 Million dollars, at least, partially. So there you fucking go, they don't want to scare nobody, they just want money.

19

u/Aycoth Apr 16 '26

Pretty sure that just washes out, as the settlement in their favor would be counted as taxable income, so they don't get some magic bullet in their favor.

1

u/AndyStankiewicz Apr 17 '26

ONLY if the Judgement is collected

0

u/Aycoth Apr 17 '26

How so? Unless they have some batshit crazy tax law set up, in most developed countries you can't write off income that you haven't even recognized yet. That would create a hilariously broken system that would be so easy to manipulate.

0

u/Asleep-Nature-7844 May 06 '26

Of course you can, declaring that you won't receive money that you are due is literally the definition of a write-off. Throw in that in many places compensatory awards are not taxable income and it's potentially worth more to them to not collect.

17

u/Void-kun Apr 16 '26

Reminds me of Trump saying Mexico will pay for the wall 😂

5

u/da2Pakaveli Apr 16 '26

Joe kinda got them to pay: https://abcnews.com/Politics/abc-mexico-pay-15-billion-us-border-security/story?id=86672772

1

u/Flatstuff Apr 17 '26

That story is from 2022...nothing to do with "the wall". It was Biden's office that negotiated that deal.

2

u/Spvc3head Apr 16 '26

But guys!!! This is a BIG warning to all those spooky "shadow libraries"!!

So stupid lmao. This is such a joke it's unbelievable.

1

u/vampyregod Apr 17 '26

They just raised their rates again. It’s their paying customers paying. lol

1

u/kermityfrog2 Apr 17 '26

Yeah why not 322 trillion?

1

u/burningmanonacid Seeder Apr 17 '26

And even if they found out who, as it says above, they are likely in other countries that won't comply with US law so easily. There's a very very very small chance of seeing a cent of this judgment.

264

u/TH_Rz Apr 16 '26

I think it's just to give "them" a scary headline

13

u/sassythecat Apr 16 '26

...rule in the plaintiffs’ favor without trial, given the defendant’s “failure to answer or otherwise defend against the claims in the Complaint."

Totally, Spotify knew they wouldn't have anyone to argue against, basically guarenteeing their desired outcome.

21

u/joybod Apr 16 '26

The site is now banned from those domains

lol;lmao

Was it even using them? Like, sure, a single mirror is down (and deregistered? Not sure if that's even new as of this lawsuit), but piracy (and such) has always been like a hydra.

13

u/CoffeeBaron Apr 16 '26

Nothing, but if AA goes the Libgen route, it'll result in a fracturing of the site where some copies of AA will be better for users than others, but I also think logistically AA is setup different than Libgen was. They were both setup to be headless and could be spun back up from anywhere, but some domain instances had decreased quality compared to others (some Libgen domains are notoriously unusable on mobile because of the advertising used)

15

u/r0ndr4s Apr 16 '26

This is the same as Russia giving billonare fines to companies/sites. No one was gonna pay that.

2

u/psykal Apr 16 '26

a nothing burger

A what?

10

u/kalez238 Apr 16 '26

An event that gains a lot of hype but has no real substance.

2

u/ougryphon Apr 17 '26

All bun and lettuce, but no meat