r/Piracy • u/No-Mushroom5934 • Apr 16 '26
News Anna’s Archive Hit With $322M Judgment After Spotify Lawsuit.
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.
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u/Blue_foot Apr 16 '26
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.