In Absentia: Spotify Wins Court Case Against Anna's Archive

A US court in New York has approved a default judgment against the shadow library Anna’s Archive, requested by Spotify. Judge Jed Rakoff followed the demands of Spotify and several music labels, who had jointly sued Anna’s Archive, according to TorrentFreak. The plaintiffs are entitled to over $300 million in damages for copyright infringement and circumvention of protective measures.

The operators of the shadow library Anna’s Archive are unknown and did not participate in the court proceedings. No money will flow as long as the operators cannot be identified. In addition to the damages payments, the default judgment also includes injunctions against various domains of Anna’s Archive. According to TorrentFreak, the domains annas-archive.org, .li, .se, .in, .pm, .gl, .ch, .pk, .gd, and .vg are to be blocked worldwide. It is now up to the domain registrars to comply with the ruling and block access. However, it is not guaranteed that all providers will comply with this request.

Anna’s Archive had downloaded over 300 terabytes of files from Spotify. In February, Anna’s Archive had begun publishing the Spotify files, which had been 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 from the music labels' lawyers.

86 million music tracks secured

Last December, the archive project announced that it had downloaded a total of 86 million music tracks from Spotify. These accounted for 37 percent of the hosted recordings, but together they represented 99.6 percent of all actual streams. Additionally, according to Anna’s Archive, metadata from 256 million recordings has been secured.

The total sum of $322 million demanded by Spotify and the music labels Sony, Warner, and Universal is composed of numerous copyright infringements and circumventions of copy protection measures. In a court document, the plaintiffs described the demanded sum as “extremely conservative”: the penalty for copyright infringement is calculated based on a small selection of just under 150 songs from those downloaded by Anna’s Archive that have already been identified. If necessary, further songs can be identified, which could mathematically increase the demanded damages sum to a trillion dollars for a total of 86 million downloaded music tracks.

(dahe)