Spotify Wins $322M From Pirate Site It Can’t Even Find

Spotify and the three major music labels just won a $322 million default judgment against Anna’s Archive, an open-source library run by unknown operators who planned to release millions of songs scraped from Spotify’s platform.

The lawsuit was filed by Spotify, Universal Music Group, Warner Music Group, and Sony Music back in January. Anna’s Archive never responded to it. That failure to answer in court meant the judge sided with the labels automatically—a default judgment.

Here’s the catch: nobody knows who actually runs Anna’s Archive. The site operates anonymously, and the operators never showed up to defend themselves in court. So while the music industry just won a huge judgment on paper, collecting $322 million from an anonymous pirate operation is a different problem entirely.

Anna’s Archive positions itself as an activist project preserving access to knowledge and culture. The site hosts millions of files scraped from various sources, including Spotify, and planned to publicly release them. The labels saw that as theft and sued.

The judgment sends a message, but it’s one directed at a ghost. If the site’s operators don’t voluntarily comply—which seems unlikely—actually collecting the money could prove nearly impossible.

Based on reporting from The Verge.