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

Spotify and the three major labels have won a $322 million default judgement against Anna’s Archive, the open-source library and pirate activist group that planned to publicly release millions of music files scraped from Spotify’s platform.

The judgment comes after the unknown 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 was made publicly available in January. The lawsuit was launched in response to Anna’s Archive announcing in December that it had ripped 86 million songs from Spotify and intended to create a “preservation archive” for music by distributing the files via BitTorrent.

In its collective complaint, Spotify and Co described Anna’s Archive’s scraping activity as “brazen theft of millions of files containing nearly all of the world’s commercial sound recordings.” The shadow library later released torrents for almost three million music files in February despite the legal ramifications it was facing.

The default judgment, issued on 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 $22.2 million collectively. The ruling also includes a permanent injunction that requires internet service providers to block the Anna’s Archive website, and an order for the shadow library to destroy all copies of works scraped from Spotify.

Actually enforcing these demands will be an uphill battle, however, given the entities behind Anna’s Archive still remain a mystery. And as Billboard notes, Anna’s Archive has previously relaunched its operations on new domain names to prevent the website from being shut down.