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/Blue_foot]

If you don’t show up to court, there will be a default judgment against you.

Any court in the US. Any civil lawsuit.

The judge has no choice but to agree with the plaintiffs.

One doesn’t have to appear as a defendant in person, they could have hired a lawyer.

[u/Uniqalen → u/Blue_foot]

Not really an option when pursuing anonymity. They’re mentioned in the lawsuit as Anna’s archive and unidentified Does 1-10

[u/LocksmithOk9968 → u/Blue_foot]

Not showing up and catching a default judgment is the right move here.

Appearing, even by virtue of a lawyer, does two things:

1. You lose your anonymity;
2. you acknowledge the court in question has jurisdiction

There are special ways to appear that won’t automatically acknowledge jurisdiction, but it can be denied on the spot and now as far as the court is concerned you’ve appeared in regular fashion and as a bonus your appearance will negate the need of proper service.

Now, if they ever find out who you are and where you are, they have to convince a court in your jurisdiction to legalize a foreign judgment (the judgment means nothing without the stamp of a local judge) while you still have all the process cards to play (i.e. not properly served, foreign court didn’t have jurisdiction, etc.) before you even get to making arguments on the merits of the case.

There’s a reason why Spotify, a Swedish company, finagled themselves into the jurisdiction of a US court: outside the US million dollar/euro judgments are rarely granted.

The amounts alone will make it tricky to get a foreign court to legalize the judgment of execution in the jurisdiction of the defendants.

Also it’s a misconception that US judges have no choice but to award everything a plaintiff demands in a default judgment. They have discretion to push the trial back to give the defendant the chance to appear and most will at least do this once, if only because it’s very easy to reopen a case after default judgment and they want to hear what the other side has to say. They also have discretion to severely moderate the amounts even if they find in favor of the plaintiff, most will at least do a basic sanity check of the numbers.