That 300TB Spotify scrape just turned into a $300 million bill

The internet’s weirdest music piracy saga has just gotten a very expensive new chapter and, not unsurprisingly, the corporate giant has come out on top. Anna’s Archive, the shadow library that claimed late last year to have scraped almost all of Spotify, has now been ordered to pay $322 million in damages to the streaming platform and three major record labels.

As reported by Engadget, a New York federal judge sided with Spotify, Universal Music Group, Warner Music Group, and Sony Music Entertainment after Anna’s Archive’s anonymous operator failed to respond to the lawsuit. The April 14 court order found against the site on copyright and contract-related claims, although a separate claim under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act was dismissed.

The damages figure is eye-catching enough on its own, but it’s actually far less than what Spotify and the labels originally went after. When the lawsuit first came to light in January, the companies were reportedly seeking a somewhat optimistic $13 trillion. The final number still isn’t exactly pocket change, with $300 million of the total going to Spotify and the rest split between Sony, Universal, and Warner.

The $300 million awarded to Spotify works out to $2,500 for each of the 120,000 scraped music files Anna’s Archive had already made public. The site had allegedly planned to release the rest later, so in that sense, it may be fortunate this case landed before more of the archive went live.

Anna’s Archive claimed in December that it had scraped metadata for 256 million tracks and audio for 86 million songs, framing the project as preservation. Spotify said it identified and disabled the accounts involved, and by January, Spotify and the labels had already sued under seal and moved to disrupt the site’s infrastructure before it could react.

Now the court has ordered Anna’s Archive to destroy any copies of works scraped from Spotify, but whether that actually happens is another question. The people behind the site are still anonymous, the platform has shown it can keep resurfacing under new domains, and collecting even a fraction of that $322 million could prove a lot easier to order than enforce.