Spotify just won $322 million from music pirates it couldn’t find

Spotify and the Big Three brands won a $322 million default judgment against Anna’s Archive, an open source library and hacker activist group that planned to publicly release millions of music files deleted from the Spotify platform.

The ruling comes after the little-known operator of Anna’s Archive failed to respond to a lawsuit filed by Spotify, Universal Music Group (UMG), Warner Music Group (WMG), and Sony Music, which became publicly available in January. The lawsuit was launched in response to Anna Archives’ December announcement I tore through 86 million songs From Spotify and aims to create a “save archive” of music by distributing files via BitTorrent.

In its class action complaint, Spotify and Co. called Anna’s Archive’s scraping activity “a brazen theft of millions of files containing virtually all of the world’s commercial audio recordings.” Shadow Library later released torrents for Nearly three million music files In February, despite the legal repercussions she was facing.

The default judgment, issued Tuesday by Judge Jed Rakoff of the Southern District of New York, awards Spotify $300 million in damages, with UMG, WMG and Sony Music awarded a combined $22.2 million. The ruling also includes a permanent injunction requiring ISPs to block Anna’s Archive, and an order for Shadow Library to destroy all copies of works deleted from Spotify.

Actual implementation of these demands will be an uphill battle, given that the entities behind Anna’s archive remain a mystery. And as Bulletin board It is noted that Anna’s Archive had previously relaunched its operations on new domain names to prevent the website from being shut down.