Spotify, in addition to Universal Music Group, Sony Music Entertainment and Warner Music Group, issued a lawsuit against the archival website and activist pirate group, Anna’s Archive. The lawsuit filed Jan. 2 was subsequently unsealed and made public Jan. 16.
Multiple complaints were made against Anna’s Archive, including direct copyright infringement, breach of contract, violation of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act and violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. The lawsuit is for $13 trillion.
This lawsuit is after Anna’s Archive scraped 300 terabytes worth of data from Spotify. The introduction of the lawsuit called it “brazen theft” of “... nearly all of the world’s commercial sound recordings by a group of anonymous Internet pirates with no regard for the law.” Anna’s Archive publicly admitted to doing this last December.
A blog post from Anna’s Archive said, “This Spotify scrape is our humble attempt to start such a ‘preservation archive’ for music.” The scrape contained 86 million music files and reflected nearly all listeners on Spotify.
“With your help, humanity’s musical heritage will be forever protected from destruction by natural disasters, wars, budget cuts and other catastrophes,” an Anna’s Archive representative said at the end of the blog.
Anna’s Archive started from The Pirate Library Mirror. Its goal was to preserve all human knowledge. It did this by blatantly defying copyright laws and “mirroring” existing libraries. The first library it mirrored was Z-Library, which led to U.S. law enforcement arresting the people allegedly connected to the project and shutting down the domains. In response, Anna’s Archive was launched and essentially was a search engine for pirated content.
Anna’s Archive is mainly known amongst college students as a website that has access to millions of textbooks and required readings that would otherwise be exorbitantly priced. Though piracy is illegal, the price of textbooks is a complaint for college students.
According to The National Center for Education Data Statistics, the average high school student “spends between $1,212 annually for books and supplies as of the 2022-23 academic year.” Anna’s Archive was one of the few places on the internet where students were able to cut corners when it came to textbooks and course materials.
Anna’s Archive faced domain suspensions in early January, which sparked confusion amongst users. It lost its “.org” domain, shutting down the website.
Conversation around the lawsuit sparked many perspectives. Music critic and internet personality, Anthony Fantano, pointed out the hypocrisy in Spotify calling out Anna’s Archive for pirating music, given the allegations that Spotify started its platform by pirating music. Many people expressed disappointment and frustration regarding losing access to the website’s resources, such as textbooks or Kindle books.
This also contributes to a larger conversation about having to subscribe to everything, as opposed to being able to own things. Most shows, movies and music have subscribed to the streaming subscription model. Many people are frustrated with feeding into this model, which is always subject to price increases or randomly removing content with no explanation or communication to the consumer.
Many streaming services merged, forcing paying customers to subscribe to the merged platform for access to content they do not want. This is currently happening to Hulu and Disney+. Spotify recently announced price changes for its premium users, which increased the price of premium for subscribers.
Anna’s Archive failed to respond to the lawsuit. This could result in a default judgment, meaning the plaintiff wins automatically.
