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 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.
I used to tell my students, “putting down anything is better than leaving an answer blank”. Still got a lot of blank answers. Anna doesn’t have anywhere near the amount for any kind of damages, so makes sense they wouldn’t show up. Hope their ops is solid, but it’s probably just a matter of time now.
They weren’t going to show up because no one knows who is running it and showing up might leave some sort of trail that could be used to identify them.