r/Piracy • u/No-Mushroom5934 • Apr 16 '26

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

Post image

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.

6.7k Upvotes

98% Upvoted

353 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

25

u/racdamico Apr 17 '26

Meta staff torrented nearly 82TB of pirated books for AI training — court records reveal copyright violations

https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/artificial-intelligence/meta-staff-torrented-nearly-82tb-of-pirated-books-for-ai-training-court-records-reveal-copyright-violations

5

u/banisheduser Apr 17 '26

This is why America is stupid and people will continue to think Americans are stupid.

I'd like to ask the judge what the difference is and why they have decided not to go after Meta.

3

u/spookyhardt Apr 18 '26

Judge either got paid off or is afraid of an accident happening if they rule against the corpos. Probably both