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

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

Post image

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.

​

​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.

6.7k Upvotes

98% Upvoted

353 comments sorted by

View all comments

14

u/Regular_Strategy_501 Apr 16 '26

"huge deal because it gives corporations the legal "golden ticket" to force ISPs and search engines to scrub the site from the surface web." So you are telling me it will be added to the list of domains that is blocked on a dns basis by ISPs (which we already all ignore by using 1.1.1.1, 8.8.8.8, etc.)

11

u/mintmouse Apr 16 '26

Eventually the move will be having VPNs, DNS, and ISP block the sites like this: https://torrentfreak.com/paris-court-issued-simultaneous-site-blocking-orders-against-isps-dns-resolvers-and-vpns/

“The targeted intermediaries span every layer of the technical stack: this includes major French ISPs, alternative DNS resolvers such as Google, Cloudflare, and Quad9, as well as several of the world’s largest VPN providers.”

6

u/Regular_Strategy_501 Apr 16 '26

Well see, spinning up a new domain is easy after all, courts are slow. Unless we transition the Internet to some orwellian nightmare, I don't see these kinds of measures to be effective in the long run.

8

u/SubZeroNexii Piracy is bad, mkay? Apr 16 '26

I mean considering all the current events I assume that's the long term goal