Anna’s Archive, the project that aimed to create “the largest truly open library in human history” by stealing copyrighted material and putting it online via BitTorrent, has been ordered to pay Spotify and the major labels $322 million in damages.
It comes after the activist group boasted in a post last year that they had scraped 86 million tracks from Spotify. A statement on their site said: “It’s the world’s first 'preservation archive' for music which is fully open.
"A while ago, we discovered a way to scrape Spotify at scale. We saw a role for us here to build a music archive primarily aimed at preservation,” adding, cheerfully, that “Spotify doesn’t have all the music in the world, but it’s a great start.”
In reply, Spotify and three major record labels – Warners, Sony and Universal – launched a lawsuit against Anna’s Archive for a truly flabbergasting $13 trillion. At a preliminary hearing in January, Anna’s Archive failed to turn up in court, so a judge filed an injunction against the group, requiring hosting platforms such as CloudFlare to prohibit access to any of their possible domains.
Quite brazenly, in February Anna’s Archive released a portion of the 86 million files. The plaintiffs then accused the group of "blatant disregard of the Preliminary Injunction."
So the judgment last week in New York’s Southern District Court can’t have come as any surprise to the defendants. Anna’s Archive has been found guilty of copyright infringement, breach of contract and the US’s Digital Millennium Copyright Act.
Of that $322 million, a reported $300 million will go to Spotify, with the record labels sharing the remaining $22 million. The only fly in the ointment is who exactly is going to cough up that amount? Anna’s Archive was run anonymously and it’s unclear what – if any - sort of trail can be traced to named individuals.
At the very least, the case proves that modern tech dictum’s of ‘move fast and break stuff’ doesn’t always lead to vast riches.
