Spotify and other major record labels have sued Anna’s Archive for $13 trillion

Spotify, along with Universal, Warner, and Sony Music, has filed a $13 trillion lawsuit against Anna’s Archive. The move follows Anna’s Archive’s December claims that it had obtained millions of Spotify sourced music files and large amounts of track metadata as part of a planned preservation archive release. The new suit alleges the site unlawfully scraped about 86 million copyrighted music files, described as covering nearly the entire commercial music catalog, and seeks roughly $151,000 in damages per file.

Spotify and the labels argue the data was scraped rather than hacked, saying Spotify disabled the accounts involved and added new safeguards. Court documents also cite Anna’s Archive’s stated plan to distribute the collection via BitTorrent and other peer to peer networks, alongside reports that up to 256 million rows of track metadata were collected.

After Anna’s Archive missed its response deadline, a federal judge issued a preliminary injunction directing infrastructure providers, including domain registries and Cloudflare, to block access to specific Anna’s Archive domains due to concerns about imminent mass distribution. The filings argue this could cause irreparable harm to rights holders and licensed services, while Anna’s Archive has denied piracy allegations by arguing that it does not directly host copyrighted files.