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Spotify and record labels Sony, Warner, and Universal have won a court order against Anna’s Archive, an anonymous group of pirates who scraped the music streamer’s vast library last year.
After the defendants failed to appear in court, Judge Jed S. Rakoff this week passed a default judgment ordering Anna’s Archive to pay $322 million. Of this, $22 million is to be awarded to the music labels for willful copyright infringement, and $300 million will go to Spotify for the Archive's violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), Music Business Worldwide reports.
But will the labels and Spotify find Anna’s Archive? The notorious group announced itself via a blog post in December, claiming they had access to the metadata of 256 million songs and audio files of 86 million songs on Spotify.
Their goal was to create the world’s first “preservation archive” for music and to gradually release the entire 300TB of data they had obtained via BitTorrent. Metadata was already out, and songs were promised for a later date based on their popularity on Spotify. According to the ruling, 120,000 songs were made available for download.
A few days after the group announced its activism, Spotify tracked their accounts and disabled them. The group had previously created copies of millions of books, papers, and magazines. Publishers filed a separate lawsuit last year, and Judge Rakoff is overseeing that case as well.
The damages for the Spotify lawsuit were calculated per violation—$150,000 for each copyright violation, giving Warner $7.2 million for its 48 infringed works, and Sony and Universal $7.5 million each for their 50 infringed tracks. As for Spotify, the streamer got $2,500 for each of the 120,000 songs made available for download, totaling $300 million.
It is highly unlikely the plaintiffs will receive the full amount they won, but the ruling acts as a warning for those planning to pirate the music-streamer's content.