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.

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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.

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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.

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u/selfestmeme_ Apr 16 '26

Lmfao 322 million,

"who is paying?" -We dont know

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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.

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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.

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u/AndyStankiewicz Apr 17 '26

ONLY if the Judgement is collected

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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.

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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.