1 month ago
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Spotify and the Big 3 record labels — Universal Music Group, Sony Music Entertainment, and Warner Music Group — have filed a lawsuit against Anna’s Archive, alleging the pirate platform scraped 86 million music files, and claiming an eye-popping $13 trillion in damages.
Anna’s Archive, formerly known as the Pirate Library Mirror, is accused of “brazen theft of millions of files containing nearly all of the world’s commercial sound recordings,” according to the full complaint. The plaintiffs believe the plan was to release the music through BitTorrent.
Via Music Business Worldwide, the lawsuit was filed on December 26th and unsealed January 16th. The labels and Spotify sought a temporary restraining order on January 2nd, and Anna’s Archive did not respond by the court-appointed date of January 16th (as a stupid person who has read zero history, I am sure this is the first time ever that a pirate operation refused a legal summons). Judge Jed S. Rakoff issued a preliminary injunction against the platform on January 20th, ordering domain registries and hosting providers to disable access to Anna’s Archive domains such as annas-archive.org, annas-archive.li, annas-archive.se, annas-archive.in, and annas-archive.pm.
On the one hand, pirating hurts musicians; even Spotify payouts are better than nothing. On the other hand, $13 trillion is a truly insane number, more than three times the country of India’s GDP. For context, that would mean each of the 86 million files caused $151,000 in damages. Big if true! Also, they are insanely behind on payouts if true! Or (big shocker) they’re lying about the profits. There are no heroes here, just the same victims — the artists — getting screwed again.
English (US) · 