Anna's Archive Loses $322 Million Spotify Piracy Case Without a Fight (torrentfreak.com)
- Reference: 0181720598
- News link: https://yro.slashdot.org/story/26/04/15/1831241/annas-archive-loses-322-million-spotify-piracy-case-without-a-fight
- Source link: https://torrentfreak.com/annas-archive-loses-322-million-spotify-piracy-case-without-a-fight/
> Spotify and several major record labels, including UMG, Sony, and Warner, [1]secured a $322 million default judgment against the unknown operators of Anna's Archive . The shadow library failed to appear in court and briefly released millions of tracks that were [2]scraped from Spotify via BitTorrent. In addition to the monetary penalty, a permanent injunction required domain registrars and other parties to [3]suspend the site's domain names. [...]
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> The music labels get the statutory maximum of $150,000 in damages for around 50 works. Spotify adds a DMCA circumvention claim of $2,500 for 120,000 music files, bringing the total to more than $322 million. The plaintiff previously described their damages request as "extremely conservative." The DMCA claim is based only on the 120,000 files, not the full 2.8 million that were released. Had they applied the $2,500 rate to all released files, the damages figure would exceed $7 billion. Anna's Archive did not show up in court, and the operators of the site remain unidentified. The judgment attempts to address this directly, by ordering Anna's Archive to file a compliance report within ten business days, under penalty of perjury, that includes valid contact information for the site and its managing agents.
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> Whether the site will comply with this order is highly uncertain. For now, the monetary judgment is mostly a victory on paper, as recouping money from an unknown entity is impossible. For this reason, the music companies also requested a permanent injunction. In addition to the damages award, [Judge Jed Rakoff] entered a permanent worldwide injunction covering ten Anna's Archive domains: annas-archive.org, .li, .se, .in, .pm, .gl, .ch, .pk, .gd, and .vg. Domain registries and registrars of record, along with hosting and internet service providers, are ordered to permanently disable access to those domains, disable authoritative nameservers, cease hosting services, and preserve evidence that could identify the site's operators.
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> The judgment names specific third parties bound by those obligations, including Public Interest Registry, Cloudflare, Switch Foundation, The Swedish Internet Foundation, Njalla SRL, IQWeb FZ-LLC, Immaterialism Ltd., Hosting Concepts B.V., Tucows Domains Inc., and OwnRegistrar, Inc. Anna's Archive is also ordered to destroy all copies of works scraped from Spotify and to file a compliance report within ten business days, under penalty of perjury, including valid contact information for the site and its managing agents. That last requirement could prove significant, given that the identity of the site's operators remains unknown.
[1] https://torrentfreak.com/annas-archive-loses-322-million-spotify-piracy-case-without-a-fight/
[2] https://entertainment.slashdot.org/story/25/12/22/1128259/spotify-says-anti-copyright-extremists-scraped-its-library
[3] https://yro.slashdot.org/story/26/01/05/2255256/annas-archive-loses-org-domain-after-surprise-suspension
Re: (Score:1)
Hopefully, for all times. It's all about adapting.
Pretty ballsy for a US District Judge (Score:5, Insightful)
to order a worldwide injunction. I'm trying to remember when we gained sovereignty over Sweeden, but can't come up with a date.
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"Okay, new ruling, you guys. Everyone on Earth named Anna has to send me a copy of their entire browser history" - the judge, tomorrow, probably.
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> "Okay, new ruling, you guys. Everyone on Earth named Anna has to send me a copy of their entire browser history"
"... and bikini pics."
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Well, he can try. And then find himself ignored.
Details are for losers and dogs! (Score:1)
> I'm trying to remember when we gained sovereignty over Sweeden, but can't come up with a date.
Donald says he only has to think about it, and ownership becomes law, just like "declassification".
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I know you're trying to make a joke, but there are a lot of rules that are literally different in different federal districts. For example, are all federal attorneys required to respect plea agreements and deals made by other districts? Nope. Some do and some do not, and that's the reason Maxwell got prosecuted even though she was exempt in the Jeffery Epstein agreement.
[1]https://www.maglaw.com/media/p... [maglaw.com]
At some point SCOTUS might finally offer a top down ruling about this, but for now it's really weir
[1] https://www.maglaw.com/media/publications/articles/2024-11-01-who-in-the-federal-government-is-bound-by-a-plea-agreement
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Hello Sunday morning lawyer!
While a US judge does not directly have the power to order other countries around for an injunction, it doesn't mean that this injunction can't be forced, and it also doesn't mean that just being in another country leaves you free to just steal any copyrighted material from another country with no consequence. In fact, the Berne Convention goes back to 1886 and has 180 national member signatories that says that every member country must extend the same copyright protections
That's hilarious (Score:5, Insightful)
I didn't know individual judges could rule over the entire world. In fact, calling it a polite request instead of a ruling ordering them to do something would probably get better results. I'd ignore him just on principal if I was anyone affected by this. Or counter-sue him personally in your local country's court system for any manner of violations. Lack of standing, threats, harassment, coercion, improper use of trademark, etc.
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If your ego is big enough, you can issue orders to the whole world. Does not mean the world will pay attention to you though.
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The phrase you are looking for is 'imperial judiciary'.
It's a complaint both sides in the U.S. make about the other side's judges.
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Australia, the UK and New Zealand have tried to do this to Josh Moon of Kiwifarms. What he's doing is legally protected in America though.
Also it's funny this judge hands this down to Anna's Archive, but the judge in the Meta/LLM case did fuck all nothing for their bullshit. He could have, at the very least, ordered Meta to pay the full cover price for one physical book for ever book they crammed through their Random Word Generation training model, and it would have been pennies in cost to Meta, but he c
How dare you steal trash from my landfill (Score:3)
> The music labels get the statutory maximum of $150,000 in damages for around 50 works
Even that still seems a bit high. What's a Spotify subscription run these days, like thirteen bucks a month? I realize the damages are based on potential lost revenue, but at this point people who aren't paying for a music subscription are probably just using the various legal free offerings instead anyway.
In the old days of Napster, there was at least the argument to be made that people might not buy an overpriced CD with a bunch of filler songs they had no interest in, but nowadays it's really not worth the effort to pirate music.
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FWIW, my "legal free offerings" are purchased CDs. I don't know how many feel the way I do, but I don't buy "temporary goods" unless you count food and medicine...and they come with stated expiration dates.
Good luck with that!! (Score:2)
Better send the Trump war machine after them... sadly they will need to attack all world and even domestic... i want to see the specially funny firework in (and from) Russia and China!!
Default Judgement (Score:3)
This is not the same as a loss... it is more of a "fuck you" to a system that lacks enforceable jurisdiction.
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> it is more of a "fuck you" to a system that lacks enforceable jurisdiction.
Right? This comment fits in with your sentiment quite well: "Whether the site will comply with this order is highly uncertain."
That "uncertain" is carrying a lot of weight there. I guess "snowball's chance in hell of them complying" doesn't carry the same editorial professionalism.
I'm Anna's Archive (Score:1)
and so's my wife.
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Shut it, big nose.
This is rich... (Score:4, Insightful)
So Anna's Archive, run by anonymous operators, is doing illegal stuff, but the AI tech bros sucking up the entire Internet and using it to train their LLMs without the permission of the owners of the material is AOK?
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It's about how much money you have, always has been.
Now we have a number. (Score:2)
Good, these calculations will serve nicely for when the same companies sue, and the same judge rules, on charges against OpenAI, Meta, Anthropic, Google, Suno, Udio, etc., who are guilty of the same crimes. Plus some extra violations on top because of the way they used the pirated works, above and beyond simply redistributing them.
Because justice is blind and the law is always applied evenly and fairly, I look forward to all of those shit companies being hit with permanent injunctions and driven out of busi
Calling billionaires ! Offshore archive.org now ! (Score:2)
It is time for tech billionaires to fight back against the copyright cartel and fund one or more offshore backups of archive.org.
What they have is to valuable to humanity to risk it being shut down by a single corrupt legislature.
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I think you mean TOO valuable ... a single district court judge.
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Thank you.
I sit corrected on both counts.
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"to" -> "too"
I leave it as an exercise for the reader to work out which to is too.
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Archive dot org will always remain online because it's very likely already been compromised. After their "hack," a lot of stuff disappeared, some even in the public domain:
[1]https://battlepenguin.com/poli... [battlepenguin.com]
[1] https://battlepenguin.com/politics/who-archives-the-archivist/
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Tech Billionaires only became billionaires by leveraging things like the copyright system.