Shadow library Anna’s Archive has been ordered to pay $322million (£237million) for scraping “nearly all of the world’s commercial sound recordings” from Spotify.
Last January, Spotify and the three main major record labels – Universal Music Group, Warner Music Group, and Sony Music Entertainment – sued Anna’s Archive for $13trillion after the library announced plans to make “the world’s first ‘preservation archive’ for music”.
The library was planning on making the music available through BitTorrent, while Billboard claimed that the group had scraped “256 million rows of track metadata and 86million audio files, to be distributed on P2P networks”. Spotify has previously called Anna’s Archive “nefarious”, alleging they were “engaged in unlawful scraping”.
Now, Anna’s Archive has been handed a default judgement to pay the hefty $322million fine, as they have failed to “answer or otherwise defend against the claims in the Complaint.” Judge Jed S. Rakoff sided with the plaintiffs, finding Anna’s Archive guilty of direct copyright infringement, breach of contract, and violation of the DMCA.
Warner, Sony and Universal will supposedly receive over $7million in damages, while Spotify is set to receive $300million. However, it’s unclear whether they will see the money, as Anna’s Archive’s operators are anonymous.
Rakoff also found that Anna’s Archive displayed a “blatant disregard” of court orders by releasing a section of the scraped files after a preliminary injunction was issued, preventing the release of copyrighted files The injunction was issued shortly after the lawsuit was initially filed, but the plaintiff’s filings found that Anna’s Archive had released songs on February 9 via 47 separate torrents.
The judge has additionally ruled that internet service providers should disable access to Anna’s Archives, and prevent other websites from hosting or distributing the scraped files.
Elsewhere, a song with millions of streams has been banned from Swedish charts for being an AI creation.
