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.
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External links
- Spotify, Warner, Universal, Sony Sue Anna's Archive for $13 TrillionExclaim! • Official source
- Spotify and the “big three” major labels are suing Anna’s Archive for $13 trillionMixMag
- Spotify and the three main major record labels sue Anna's Archive for $13trillion for "brazen theft of millions of files containing nearly all of the world’s commercial sound recordings"NME
Comments
Perfect. so now artists can sue spotify for the leak and claim those 13 trillion for the loss of their credits as it his THEIR art and also their damage, right ? Right ? ^^
Naw just the labels get the money. Most artists sign over distribution rights and only some are able to buy it back later. Also lawsuits can name however much random figure they want when filing when it comes to demands and the deficit run by the US federal government for FY2026 is only 1/10 of the amount here so this is filed for attention anyway.
Someone call Luigi - we need a hero.
Alright everyone time to mass boycott those 4 companies. They gonna find out not to FAFO.
Wellp, they're not going to get paid more than the artists who've had their work stolen by AI, but I guess someone will go to prison.
Spotify should get sued to oblivion for paying pennies to artists....
151k per song is crazy, lets feed multi billion dollar companies even more
$150k per song ripped... this has to be a joke. I hope they intend to use this money to pay human artist.
You can't measure profit loss by something like this. In fact for all they know they gained money from so called "piracy" due to the free advertising. The argument would hold the same weight. Wake me when music artists sue Spotify for screwing them over out of money they are owed.
Theses things happen in US, where someone could get condemned of centuries of prison time, which doesn't make more sense.
Again, Spotify is not the legal owner for the music, and so cannot sue (or be sued) for this hack. And anything Spotify has been doing so far is blessed with major music publishers.
Now, Anna's Archive hasn't released any song yet, mostly waiting for events to unfold (naively hopping Spotify and al would let it be), so until its servers get hacked by some completely out of US jurisdiction hackers, few years of prison for each member, for violating some recent recent cybersecurity laws, is certainly what to expect.
Now, we just need to wait few years to get the final judge decision.
It's just a random and large number. When filing a civil suit you can name essentially nonsensical figures since damages and compensation aren't determined until you know, if they actually prevail and an actual amount would need to be determined. You can seek however much you want but that's unrelated to how much you actually will get. The president sues for outrageously hilarious sums all the tiime but as far as I can tell he has never gotten the amount he filed for, since it's basically a placeholder number. You need to make it known that you're seeking compensatory and not injunctive relief only and while you're at it, just make up some outlandish number for the headlines and lols.