Anna's Archive Loses $322 Million Spotify Piracy Case Without a Fight (torrentfreak.com) 67
An anonymous reader quotes a report from TorrentFreak: Spotify and several major record labels, including UMG, Sony, and Warner, secured a $322 million default judgment against the unknown operators of Anna's Archive. The shadow library failed to appear in court and briefly released millions of tracks that were scraped from Spotify via BitTorrent. In addition to the monetary penalty, a permanent injunction required domain registrars and other parties to suspend the site's domain names. [...]
The music labels get the statutory maximum of $150,000 in damages for around 50 works. Spotify adds a DMCA circumvention claim of $2,500 for 120,000 music files, bringing the total to more than $322 million. The plaintiff previously described their damages request as "extremely conservative." The DMCA claim is based only on the 120,000 files, not the full 2.8 million that were released. Had they applied the $2,500 rate to all released files, the damages figure would exceed $7 billion. Anna's Archive did not show up in court, and the operators of the site remain unidentified. The judgment attempts to address this directly, by ordering Anna's Archive to file a compliance report within ten business days, under penalty of perjury, that includes valid contact information for the site and its managing agents.
Whether the site will comply with this order is highly uncertain. For now, the monetary judgment is mostly a victory on paper, as recouping money from an unknown entity is impossible. For this reason, the music companies also requested a permanent injunction. In addition to the damages award, [Judge Jed Rakoff] entered a permanent worldwide injunction covering ten Anna's Archive domains: annas-archive.org, .li, .se, .in, .pm, .gl, .ch, .pk, .gd, and .vg. Domain registries and registrars of record, along with hosting and internet service providers, are ordered to permanently disable access to those domains, disable authoritative nameservers, cease hosting services, and preserve evidence that could identify the site's operators.
The judgment names specific third parties bound by those obligations, including Public Interest Registry, Cloudflare, Switch Foundation, The Swedish Internet Foundation, Njalla SRL, IQWeb FZ-LLC, Immaterialism Ltd., Hosting Concepts B.V., Tucows Domains Inc., and OwnRegistrar, Inc. Anna's Archive is also ordered to destroy all copies of works scraped from Spotify and to file a compliance report within ten business days, under penalty of perjury, including valid contact information for the site and its managing agents. That last requirement could prove significant, given that the identity of the site's operators remains unknown.
The music labels get the statutory maximum of $150,000 in damages for around 50 works. Spotify adds a DMCA circumvention claim of $2,500 for 120,000 music files, bringing the total to more than $322 million. The plaintiff previously described their damages request as "extremely conservative." The DMCA claim is based only on the 120,000 files, not the full 2.8 million that were released. Had they applied the $2,500 rate to all released files, the damages figure would exceed $7 billion. Anna's Archive did not show up in court, and the operators of the site remain unidentified. The judgment attempts to address this directly, by ordering Anna's Archive to file a compliance report within ten business days, under penalty of perjury, that includes valid contact information for the site and its managing agents.
Whether the site will comply with this order is highly uncertain. For now, the monetary judgment is mostly a victory on paper, as recouping money from an unknown entity is impossible. For this reason, the music companies also requested a permanent injunction. In addition to the damages award, [Judge Jed Rakoff] entered a permanent worldwide injunction covering ten Anna's Archive domains: annas-archive.org, .li, .se, .in, .pm, .gl, .ch, .pk, .gd, and .vg. Domain registries and registrars of record, along with hosting and internet service providers, are ordered to permanently disable access to those domains, disable authoritative nameservers, cease hosting services, and preserve evidence that could identify the site's operators.
The judgment names specific third parties bound by those obligations, including Public Interest Registry, Cloudflare, Switch Foundation, The Swedish Internet Foundation, Njalla SRL, IQWeb FZ-LLC, Immaterialism Ltd., Hosting Concepts B.V., Tucows Domains Inc., and OwnRegistrar, Inc. Anna's Archive is also ordered to destroy all copies of works scraped from Spotify and to file a compliance report within ten business days, under penalty of perjury, including valid contact information for the site and its managing agents. That last requirement could prove significant, given that the identity of the site's operators remains unknown.
Calling billionaires ! Offshore archive.org now ! (Score:2)
What they have is to valuable to humanity to risk it being shut down by a single corrupt legislature.
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I sit corrected on both counts.
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I leave it as an exercise for the reader to work out which to is too.
Re:Calling billionaires ! Offshore archive.org now (Score:4, Interesting)
https://battlepenguin.com/poli... [battlepenguin.com]
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Tech Billionaires only became billionaires by leveraging things like the copyright system.
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Maybe we need something like the "data haven" described in the book Cryptonomicon... Find a country that doesn't give a stuff about copyright or America and is willing to let someone build big data centers full of cloud storage to hold all the stuff.
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Gee. I wonder which billionaires are in charge of products that sourced their data from Anna's archive.
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all of them.
Still up (Score:1)
>> a permanent worldwide injunction covering ten Anna's Archive domains: annas-archive.org, .li, .se, .in, .pm, .gl, .ch, .pk, .gd, and .vg.
annas-archive.org .gs .li .se .pm .in .vg & .ch were taken down months ago. annas-archive.gl .pk .and .gd are still up (April 15, 2026).
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Im not sure what actual power the judge has here. Internationally those sorts of orders have no status and at best are just suggestions. Same goes with orders to comply if Annas Archive is hosted internationally. Probably russians, who in turn probably dont give a flying fuck about the opinion of some random american judge.
Pretty ballsy for a US District Judge (Score:5, Insightful)
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"Okay, new ruling, you guys. Everyone on Earth named Anna has to send me a copy of their entire browser history"
"... and bikini pics."
Re: Pretty ballsy for a US District Judge (Score:1)
I don't remember her being in a bikini, but my mind blanked from self preservation almost immediately.
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Well, he can try. And then find himself ignored.
Details are for losers and dogs! (Score:1)
Donald says he only has to think about it, and ownership becomes law, just like "declassification".
Re: Details are for losers and dogs! (Score:2)
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https://www.maglaw.com/media/p... [maglaw.com]
At some point SCOTUS might finally offer a top down ruling about this, but for now it's really weir
Re:Pretty ballsy for a US District Judge (Score:5, Informative)
While a US judge does not directly have the power to order other countries around for an injunction, it doesn't mean that this injunction can't be forced, and it also doesn't mean that just being in another country leaves you free to just steal any copyrighted material from another country with no consequence. In fact, the Berne Convention goes back to 1886 and has 180 national member signatories that says that every member country must extend the same copyright protections to the creations of those in other nations as though they were their own citizens. Essentially it means that all signatory members must automatically recognize any US copyright protection, so by the judge ordering this injunction and stating that Anna's Archive violated copyright, by extension every member nation of the Berne Agreement recognizes the copyright of all of the plaintiffs and in essence would recognize that Anna's Archive violated their copyrights.
Further under the TRIPS Agreement in the WTO (1994), all members must provide the same copyright protections to foreign citizens that they would provide to their own citizens, along with a minimum set of standards such as no illegal copying and distribution of copyrighted works.
By ordering this injunction, he's declaring that under US Law Anna's Archive violated the US entities' copyrights, and under Berne and TRIPS at a minimum (and probably other treaties), every member nation of the WTO and the Berne Agreement would provide the same protections to those US entities against illegal copying.
So in effect, yes, he can order a worldwide injunction to at least member states of the Berne Convention and the WTO because all of those nations would provide the same legal protection. The enforcement may vary from country to country, but none allow for illegal distribution of copyrighted materials.
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Re:Pretty ballsy for a US District Judge (Score:4, Interesting)
every member country must extend the same copyright protections to the creations of those in other nations as though they were their own citizens
But member countries don't have to extend the same copyright protections as the US. Just because Anna's Archive is infringing copyright doesn't mean that the .se registrar is. Sure, a .se DNS record assists Anna's Archive in its activities, but different countries disagree on whether that's grounds for forcing the registrar to take the record down.
along with a minimum set of standards such as no illegal copying and distribution of copyrighted works
And maintaining a DNS record doesn't meet that standard; it's just a directory listing telling people how to obtain infringing copies.
Re:Pretty ballsy for a US District Judge (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Pretty ballsy for a US District Judge (Score:4, Insightful)
In practice, many do. Allow piracy, i mean.
Because it is considered minor. Judges, sane ones i mean, care about serious cases. Like drug trafficking, murders, child abuse. These kind of things. Downloading books is not one of these things. And if they are not completely stupid, they give pirates a little bit of rope so the public doesn't escalate towards means of exchange that would not be practically possible to monitor.
Your internet provider and VPN provider know very well you download stuff. They say they don't but they do. They monitor what you do. And if you download child porn or order a murder on the internet they will rat on you. Since most people content themselves with pirating stuff and are not interested in seeing children being raped, they continue to use these services and accept to be monitored, knowing very well nobody is going after them for their peccadillo.
That's why in practice The Pirate Bay is still easy to find. A bit of gesticulation from the judges so the most retarded of the lawyers leave them alone but they carefully leave the door open.
Or else people would move to the darknet, sneakernets (impossible to monitor) or worse, some sort of decentralised internet. Anything judges can't put their nose in. These laws are not enforceable because nearly nobody take them that seriously.
And if people work out a decentralised internet, state actors will take advantage of the fact they can't be monitored and even less censored to spew propaganda and we'll end up with an even more destructive president than Trump. The Russians managed to ease the election of Trump but that could have been prevented. With what i just described, that would be impossible to stop.
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That's hilarious (Score:5, Insightful)
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If your ego is big enough, you can issue orders to the whole world. Does not mean the world will pay attention to you though.
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The phrase you are looking for is 'imperial judiciary'.
It's a complaint both sides in the U.S. make about the other side's judges.
Re:That's hilarious (Score:4, Insightful)
Also it's funny this judge hands this down to Anna's Archive, but the judge in the Meta/LLM case did fuck all nothing for their bullshit. He could have, at the very least, ordered Meta to pay the full cover price for one physical book for ever book they crammed through their Random Word Generation training model, and it would have been pennies in cost to Meta, but he couldn't even be fucked to do something symbolic like that.
Fuck how backwards all of this is.
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Also it's funny this judge hands this down to Anna's Archive, but the judge in the Meta/LLM case did fuck all nothing for their bullshit.
This was a default judgement as no one was present to defend Anna's Archive. As such, since no one objected, the remedy is the one proposed by the plaintiffs. This is how the legal system works, there is nothing unusual going on here.
The "worldwide injunction" is, however, an issue the judge should have stepped in on. The USSC ruled on the subject last year that universal injunctions are beyond the power of a district court to grant.
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It's even funnier when you think that not only did Anna's Archive piss off the record companies, they made them waste money and time in court too.
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Kinda. Yes, the US-based judge could issue a judgment that affects the .org domain, as that's managed by a US-based company. But the rest? The judge has no authority for Liechtenstein (.li), Sweden (.se), India (.in), Saint Pierre and Miquelon (.pm), Greenland (.gl), Switzerland (.ch), Pakistan (.pk), Grenada (.gd), and the British Virgin Islands (.vg).
The rant about threats, harassment, coercion, not so much.
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How dare you steal trash from my landfill (Score:3)
The music labels get the statutory maximum of $150,000 in damages for around 50 works
Even that still seems a bit high. What's a Spotify subscription run these days, like thirteen bucks a month? I realize the damages are based on potential lost revenue, but at this point people who aren't paying for a music subscription are probably just using the various legal free offerings instead anyway.
In the old days of Napster, there was at least the argument to be made that people might not buy an overpriced CD with a bunch of filler songs they had no interest in, but nowadays it's really not worth the effort to pirate music.
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FWIW, my "legal free offerings" are purchased CDs. I don't know how many feel the way I do, but I don't buy "temporary goods" unless you count food and medicine...and they come with stated expiration dates.
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I've certainly bought a few albums when most of the songs are solid, but since my tastes tend to run fairly mainstream, there's also a lot of catchy singles that really are surrounded by filler. Napster (and the various P2P networks it inspired) filled in the gap to let you essentially have your own curated playlists without having to feel like you're forced into paying for a bunch of songs you didn't want in the process. Now though, you can do the same thing with a relatively inexpensive subscription and
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FWIW, the albums I play are played via computer, and I edit out any songs I don't want. If they put in some stuff I don't want, I just don't play it. I feel like I'm paying for the CD, not the songs. They never fill the CD, so if they include extra stuff, I just don't care.
FWIW, this is a lot better than LPs were, where you basically had to live with the selection they chose.
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Albums don't really exist on spotify anymore. I mean they do exist theoretically, but most music renters never listen to full albums. Spotify just feeds them individual songs according to their algorithm. I suspect in the near future, if it's not happened already, musicians will just be releasing singles as albums have no real meaning in this streaming world.
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> Even that still seems a bit high.
That's the statutory limit for willful infringement.
> I realize the damages are based on potential lost revenue,
Statutory damages are not based on anything except the statute.
Good luck with that!! (Score:1)
Better send the Trump war machine after them... sadly they will need to attack all world and even domestic... i want to see the specially funny firework in (and from) Russia and China!!
Default Judgement (Score:3)
This is not the same as a loss... it is more of a "fuck you" to a system that lacks enforceable jurisdiction.
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it is more of a "fuck you" to a system that lacks enforceable jurisdiction.
Right? This comment fits in with your sentiment quite well: "Whether the site will comply with this order is highly uncertain."
That "uncertain" is carrying a lot of weight there. I guess "snowball's chance in hell of them complying" doesn't carry the same editorial professionalism.
I'm Anna's Archive (Score:1)
and so's my wife.
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This is rich... (Score:5, Insightful)
So Anna's Archive, run by anonymous operators, is doing illegal stuff, but the AI tech bros sucking up the entire Internet and using it to train their LLMs without the permission of the owners of the material is AOK?
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I'm pretty sure they're getting sued too.
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It's also not clear if the LLMs are legally OK. They may end up having to pay after the lawsuits are all settled out.
Now we have a number. (Score:4, Interesting)
Because justice is blind and the law is always applied evenly and fairly, I look forward to all of those shit companies being hit with permanent injunctions and driven out of business with fines of kazillions of dollars.
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How (Score:2)
To be expected (Score:2)
Why should they fight in court for a case they would clearly lose? They did it because they think they won't be found or can't be persecuted because of the legislation they are in. Why should they defend themselves in an US court for something that is illegal in the US?
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Throwing away their only weapon (anonymity) would be quite dumb.