Anna's Archive told to pay Spotify and record labels $322 million over unprecedented music scraping

Source: Engadget

The open-source library and search engine Anna’s Archive has been ordered to pay Spotify and the three of the world’s largest music labels $322 million in damages after it claimed to have scraped the entirety of the streaming platform’s library of music.

Spotify, Universal Music Group, Warner Music Group and Sony Music Entertainment, sued Anna’s Archive in January for a slightly comical $13 trillion. They alleged Anna's Archive had illegally scraped 86 million songs — a significant chunk of all the music on the planet — and intended to make them available for download via BitTorrent. At the time, Spotify called the scraping a "brazen theft of millions of files containing nearly all of the world’s commercial sound recordings."

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The total breakdown of damages includes $7.5 million to each of Sony and Universal Music and $7.2 million to Warner Music, with the remaining $300 million going to Spotify. The latter figure amounts to $2,500 for each of the 120,000 scraped music files already made available by Anna’s Archive. The remainder of the 86 million files were due to be released to the public at a later date.

The court also ordered Anna’s Archive to "immediately destroy all copies and phonorecords of any work ‘scraped,’ downloaded, copied or otherwise extracted from Spotify," but whether it actually does this, or indeed hands over a penny of the damages, remains to be seen. The bizarre reality of this case is that the person (or people) behind Anna’s Archive remains a mystery.

Read more: https://www.engadget.com/big-tech/annas-archive-told-to-pay-spotify-and-record-labels-322-million-over-unprecedented-music-scraping-151034032.html