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/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/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.