Spotify and several major record labels, including UMG, Sony, and Warner, secured a $322 million default judgment against the unknown operators of Anna’s Archive. The shadow library failed to appear in court and briefly released millions of tracks that were scraped from Spotify via BitTorrent. In addition to the monetary penalty, a permanent injunction required domain registrars and other parties to suspend the site’s domain names.
Anna’s Archive did not show up in court, and the operators of the site remain unidentified. The judgment attempts to address this directly, by ordering Anna’s Archive to file a compliance report within ten business days, under penalty of perjury, that includes valid contact information for the site and its managing agents.
This is just going to get more people to torrent out those Spotify files. Nice job Streisand.
Except that various ISP’s have been tracking such things for years, sometimes with very hard outcomes for torrenting users.
I don’t know why Anna’s got involved in music, anyway. This was always going to be the approximate outcome, and it arguably wasn’t needed, anyway. Last I checked, one could simply download YT, Spotify material etc with a tool or two, easy-peasy. Why not leave such a hot-button issue alone…?
Now, if Anna’s goes down, then a bunch of other material is lost that has vastly lesser (or zero) copyright issue. Some of that stuff I’m not sure you can find anywhere else online other than (maybe) torrents, or the equally-shaky LibGen.
&*(@^!$
it was to ensure an archive before complete poisoning by ai
Explain…?
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.
