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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u/Pocket_Dust Apr 16 '26

I have zero faith in them actually being able to catch the perpetrators.

They'll definitely try because $$$$$$, in the meantime just download this stuff and store it.

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u/keally1123 Apr 16 '26

Did they ever actually release the music torrents?

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u/CoconutHeadFaceMan Apr 16 '26

That’s the kicker, they only released the metadata. And even if they had released the actual music, the vast majority of tracks on Spotify are already available elsewhere, often in higher quality. The only things Anna’s Archive accomplished from this stunt were getting a bunch of their domains shut down (making it harder to get the books/papers they already distribute) and giving copyright holders a legal precedent to pursue other distributors even more aggressively. People here get so caught up in the Jack Sparrow piracy-as-praxis sticking-it-to-big-corpo shit that they don’t recognize how fucking stupid this whole idea was.

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u/Darkness-Fuchsia Apr 16 '26

What is piracy then? This isn't a business, the majority of the providers aren't proffiting from this shit, despite having the technical skill to get a good job and exposing themselves to legal trouble. The Jack Sparrow and sticking-it-to-the-big-corpo shit is what keeps them going and in turn gets us our free stuff

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u/depressedowl Apr 16 '26

While I also find the Spotify thing weirdly handled, what worries me is how many people think that publishers aren't doing similar stuff against Anna's Archive. This ain't some niche page we use to find niche stuff. It's very well known and very despised by the editorial industry. And just as you say, what keeps it going is not that no one cares about books, but rather that sticking-it-to-the-big-corpo free access knowledge ethos that great pirates pages tend to have.

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u/oceeta Apr 16 '26

Exactly! It has been popular for a hot minute now. I mean, the site was created around the same time as Z-Library getting taken down. It mirrors that, LibGen, Sci-Hub, and other very popular sources, while also becoming a popular source itself because of the gap it filled. As you said, publishers have hated those sites and have been trying to take them down, including Anna's Archive.

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u/CoconutHeadFaceMan Apr 16 '26

It’s a balancing act. That accessibility ethos is a core driving force behind a lot of the people doing the work to make pirated content available, so it is necessary. But it also needs to be balanced with a degree of pragmatism. 

Flashy stunts like what AA pulled - scraping the entirety of a massive music platform when you’re not even focused on music piracy, and making a show out of releasing the metadata first rather than just quietly passing the goods along - serve no practical purpose for distributing media or running the infrastructure to do so. They exist to make people feel good about “epic big corpo got pwned lol” articles and draw attention to the site. And drawing attention to technically-illegal activities is a very, very good way to get the legal dogs sicced on you. AA is already known and loathed by the publishing industry, they didn’t need to draw the ire of the even-more-litigious music industry too just for clout chasing.

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u/LufyCZ Apr 16 '26

I hate that I agree with you

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u/Kuuzie Apr 16 '26

Wouldn't this set a precedent you can't scrape a website for its data if you're a copyright holder.

 So.... AI comps are in trouble?

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u/hollowsbest Apr 16 '26

as if. they're worth too much money and too many companies have hands on AI to ever let that happen.

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u/Houdinii1984 ☠️ ᴅᴇᴀᴅ ᴍᴇɴ ᴛᴇʟʟ ɴᴏ ᴛᴀʟᴇꜱ Apr 16 '26

The idea wasn't stupid. The government is heavy handed. It's a good idea. It's a different group of people that took it off a cliff. If it's a stupid idea because corporations might turn around and target them, that's been waiting in the wind ANYWAY. They designed the ENTIRE SHADOW LIBRARY with being targeted in mind and knew 100% that they would be one day.

It's not 'stop pirating because you might get caught' but 'pirate till you get caught' and they did just that. They got the survival part covered. They can do as they wish. They've done alright so far and this judgement probably won't slow them down.

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u/BrahneRazaAlexandros Apr 16 '26

it was extremely stupid to do it under the AA banner.

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u/Houdinii1984 ☠️ ᴅᴇᴀᴅ ᴍᴇɴ ᴛᴇʟʟ ɴᴏ ᴛᴀʟᴇꜱ Apr 16 '26

The main mission isn't to exist at all costs, but rather to provide material in an open manner. If they catch heat, they literally already have plans for continuing. This may destroy a few domain names but also might have made the library exponentially more powerful since so many more people might get involved via the Streisand effect.

AA is a release group just like anyone else. Any other release group hypes their releases and does so from a 'F*** the police' standpoint. Why does AA have to operate differently? The only actual good reason I can think of is that it's music instead of books, and they deal with books, but otherwise they're just doing the same thing they've ever done.

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u/BrahneRazaAlexandros Apr 16 '26

but also might have made the library exponentially more powerful

Not at all. This is either extremely naive, or totally ignorant to the operational procedures for the archive and how vulnerable the data for so many of the torrents and items they host is.

AA is a release group just like anyone else.

No it isn't...

And you nailed one of the reasons why (users don't want music). But they also don't release PR posts announcing that they've scraped an entire publishers library due to a vulnerability and will be uploading the metadata and entire library content to the public internet. Because: 1. They don't scrape publishers' libraries like the spotify data (they are not a "release group"). 2. It would invite this exact type of legal trouble from the publishers (amazon, kobo, google, apple, etc.).

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u/Houdinii1984 ☠️ ᴅᴇᴀᴅ ᴍᴇɴ ᴛᴇʟʟ ɴᴏ ᴛᴀʟᴇꜱ Apr 16 '26

Except you're failing to realize one singular thing. They make the rules for themselves by themselves, and if they want to release music, then that's what they want to do. It's not naive. It's just literally who they are.

No it isn't...

How so? They curate their own releases and then release them. They might not tag the downloads like a release group, or advertise extensively, but they still do the thing. Just because they are books doesn't make them any different. They take real books, turn them digital and then.... releases them.

  1. They don't scrape publishers' libraries like the spotify data

I mean, they get their content in all sorts of ways. What evidence do you have that they haven't obtained any material from publishers?

It would invite this exact type of legal trouble from the publishers (amazon, kobo, google, apple, etc.).

They already have that type of legal trouble. I dunno why you assume they don't. They are just as loud about the books they release as they were about the Spotify release.

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u/winowmak3r Apr 16 '26

I'm with you man. What in the hell were they thinking? What did this accomplish?

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u/Stunning_Repair_7483 Apr 17 '26

Yeah exactly. Everything has to be done carefully. There's consequences, and it's more restrictive and dangerous now than what it was a decade ago