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.
Anna’s Archive is generally known as a meta-search engine for shadow libraries, helping users find pirated books and other related resources.
However, last December, the site announced that it had also backed up Spotify, which came as a shock to the music industry.
Anna’s Archive initially released only Spotify metadata, and no actual music, but that put the music industry on high alert. Together with the likes of Universal, Warner, and Sony, Spotify filed a lawsuit days later, hoping to shut the site down.
Through a preliminary injunction targeting domain registrars and registries, the shadow library lost several domain names. However, not all were taken down, and the site registered various new domain names as backups.
The legal pressure also appeared to pay off in other ways. Not long after the lawsuit was filed, the shadow library removed the Spotify listing for their torrents page. The same applies to the first batch of music files that was accidentally released in February.
The site’s operator, Anna’s Archivist, hoped that these removals would motivate the music industry to back down, but that wasn’t the case. Instead, they returned to court requesting a $322 million default judgment after the defendant failed to show up in court.
$322 Million, Granted in Full
Yesterday, Judge Jed Rakoff of the Southern District of New York entered a default judgment against the site’s unknown operators, awarding Spotify and the major labels the requested $322 million damages award in full.