On April 16, a U.S. federal judge ruled in absentia on Tuesday that Anna’s Archive must pay $322 million in damages to Spotify and the three major record labels, but only $22.2 million of that is for copyright infringement. The remaining $300 million was awarded solely to Spotify under the anti-circumvention provisions of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), a claim that does not require the plaintiff to own the copyright to the core works.
As Judge Jed S. Rakoff of the Southern District of New York issued his ruling, Anna’s Archive, whose anonymous operator failed to appear in court, announced in December that it had scraped 86 million audio files from Spotify and planned to distribute them via BitTorrent. This prompted Spotify, along with Universal Music Group, Sony Music Entertainment, and Warner Music Group, to file a lawsuit in January.
The record companies’ direct copyright infringement claims involve 148 confirmed works, totaling $22.2 million based on the statutory maximum damages of $150,000 per work. This compensation was shared by Sony Music, Universal Music, and Atlantic Records. By the standards of major record companies’ infringement cases, this is a relatively small amount.
Spotify’s compensation was calculated differently. Because Spotify does not own the copyright to the audio recordings on its platform, it cannot directly file an infringement claim. Instead, Spotify argued that Anna’s Archive bypassed its technical safeguards—systems used to verify identity and prevent the scraping of audio files—violating Section 1201 of the DMCA. Judge Lakoff calculated the damages based on the 120,000 documents obtained as evidence by Spotify’s lawyers, using the statutory maximum damages of $2,500 (approximately RMB 17,081) for each instance of circumvention, ultimately awarding $300 million in damages. It is noteworthy that this damages amount is not based on Anna’s Archive’s subsequent handling of these documents, but rather on the act of bypassing access controls itself.
This ruling could set a significant precedent: any platform that restricts access to content through authentication mechanisms can now claim that its scraping constitutes circumvention under Section 1201, and can claim statutory damages of up to $2,500 per individual file. Such claims do not require the plaintiff to own the copyright to the core content, nor do they require proof of actual damage or loss.
This ruling is likely to apply to cases involving artificial intelligence (AI) training datasets. Anna’s Archive previously referred to its data scraping as “preservative archiving,” a term highly similar to the defenses given by AI labs for preserving scraped content. Nvidia is currently facing a lawsuit in Nazemian v. Nvidia, in which the plaintiff accuses Nvidia of using books obtained from Anna’s Archive to train models. The amended complaint mentions internal communications alleging that Nvidia’s data strategy team negotiated high-speed access to approximately 500TB of related data.
The case is currently accused of direct infringement, and the Spotify ruling incorporated Section 1201 into the plaintiff’s legal basis, applicable to various entities whose core content was previously behind identity verification systems. This also covers almost all web content scraped by commercial AI labs.
Spotify is practically unlikely to obtain compensation from Anna’s Archive, partly because its operators are anonymous, and partly because the website has consistently managed to relaunch with a new domain after enforcement actions. However, the true value of this ruling lies in its potential to set a precedent for future defendants whose identities are not anonymous.
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