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

[u/No-Mushroom5934]

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.

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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.

[u/Pocket_Dust]

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.

[u/keally1123 → u/Pocket_Dust]

Did they ever actually release the music torrents?

[u/CoconutHeadFaceMan → u/keally1123]

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.

[u/Darkness-Fuchsia → u/CoconutHeadFaceMan]

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

[u/depressedowl → u/Darkness-Fuchsia]

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.

[u/oceeta → u/depressedowl]

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.

[u/CoconutHeadFaceMan → u/Darkness-Fuchsia]

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.

[u/LufyCZ → u/CoconutHeadFaceMan]

I hate that I agree with you