Spotify wants over 300 million US dollars from Anna's Archive

Spotify and music labels are demanding over 300 million US dollars in damages from the shadow library Anna’s Archive for copyright infringement and the circumvention of protective measures. Anna’s Archive had downloaded and partially published over 300 terabytes of files from Spotify.

The operators of Anna’s Archive did not respond to a lawsuit filed by Spotify and music labels. Therefore, the plaintiffs are now requesting a default judgment from the responsible court in New York, which they have submitted to Judge Jed Rakoff. In it, they quantify the damages at a total of 322 million US dollars, of which 300 million are to go to Spotify. The remainder is to be divided among the labels Sony, Warner, and Universal.

Damages sum “extremely conservative”

The demanded damages sum is composed of numerous copyright violations and circumventions of copy protection measures. In a second court document, the plaintiffs describe the demanded sum as “extremely conservative”: The rate for copyright infringements is calculated based on a small selection of only about 150 songs downloaded by Anna’s Archive that have already been identified.

If necessary, further songs can be identified, which would allow the demanded damages sum to be increased more or less arbitrarily: For each work, the plaintiffs demand the legally stipulated maximum sum of 150,000 US dollars, which with almost 150 songs amounts to “only” 22 million dollars towards the total sum of 322 million US dollars. For the total of 86 million downloaded music pieces, the plaintiffs could claim a trillion-dollar sum purely mathematically.

Domains to be blocked

In reality, these are just number games: It is practically impossible for the operator of Anna’s Archive to pay the 322 million US dollars demanded by Spotify and music labels. More relevant in practice are injunctions that the plaintiffs also propose: Various domains of Anna’s Archive are to be permanently shut down. Following a preliminary injunction, the .org address of the shadow library has already been blocked. However, Anna’s Archive can still be accessed via other domains.

In February, Anna’s Archive had begun publishing the Spotify files, which was prohibited by a preliminary injunction. In a Reddit thread, the operators later wrote that it had been a mistake. They had stopped the publication for now because it was not worth the additional trouble caused by the music labels' lawyers.

Anna’s Archive is usually used as a meta-search engine for documents and books. Last December, the archive project announced that it had downloaded a total of 86 million music pieces from Spotify. These represent 37 percent of the hosted recordings, but together they accounted for 99.6 percent of all actual streams. Thus, popular pieces were copied above all. In addition, Anna’s Archive claims to have secured metadata for 256 million recordings.

(dahe)