Anna's Archive Loses $322M Spotify Piracy Case Without a Fight

Judgment

A federal judge in Manhattan has granted Spotify and major record labels a default judgment of roughly $322.2 million against the unknown operators of Anna’s Archive after the site’s operators failed to appear in court. Judge Jed Rakoff entered the award in full yesterday, giving the labels the statutory maximum damages for selected works and Spotify a massive DMCA circumvention award tied to hundreds of thousands of files. It has been reported that Anna’s Archive briefly made available millions of tracks allegedly scraped from Spotify via BitTorrent — a move that apparently galvanized the industry into swift legal action.

How the math adds up

The bulk of the sum — $300 million — comes from Spotify’s claim of $2,500 per music file for 120,000 files under the DMCA anti-circumvention statute; the labels picked up statutory damages of $150,000 for roughly 50 recordings each. The plaintiffs called their request “extremely conservative.” Had Spotify applied that $2,500 rate to the full 2.8 million files reportedly released, damages would have ballooned well past $7 billion. Large numbers. Big headlines. But numbers don’t always mean cash in hand.

Injunction and the messy aftermath

Alongside the money judgment, Rakoff issued a permanent worldwide injunction targeting ten Anna’s Archive domains and ordering registries, registrars, hosts and ISPs to suspend them. The judgment also requires the site to file a compliance report within ten business days, under penalty of perjury, supplying contact details for its operators — a demand that, given the site’s anonymity, may produce nothing. It has been reported that Anna’s Archive removed Spotify listings and the initial music dump after the lawsuit, and the site had already been shifting domains like a hydra — registering backups when names were taken. So is this a decisive win, or just a victory on paper? For rights holders it’s a moral and legal win; for anyone hoping to actually collect $322 million from anonymous operators, it’s probably more wishlist than windfall.

Sources: torrentfreak.com, Hacker News