Anna's Archive Loses $322 Million Spotify Piracy Case Without a Fight * TorrentFreak
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Spotify and several major record labels have secured a $322 million default judgment against the unknown operators of Anna's Archive.

Spotify and several major record labels, including UMG, Sony, and Warner, secured a $322 million default judgment against the unknown operators of Anna’s Archive. The shadow library failed to appear in court and briefly released millions of tracks that were scraped from Spotify via BitTorrent. In addition to the monetary penalty, a permanent injunction required domain registrars and other parties to suspend the site’s domain names.

  • peacefulpixel@lemmy.worlddeleted by creatorEnglish
    0·
    2 months ago

    well i’m not some fuckin legal expert or anything i’m just giving my thoughts on the internet.

    “Anna’s Archive” is literally named in the suit, the people who run it are anonymous yes. they didn’t respond to the charges yes. they didn’t show up in court yes. but they are named in the suit. so yea

    I’m saying it’s public because they called a lot of attention to themselves that they had 100tb of data connected to a very aggressive corporation that basically has infinite resources with the help of the largest media conglomerates in the world.

    Leaks and piracy are often conflated, especially when talking about legal precedents. But leaks are not piracy. You are not pirating it, it wasn’t even for sale in the first place at that point. It was literally just stolen. When punishments for leaks happen, especially big eye catching suits being won with literally no pushback it often emboldens already untouchable media conglomerates in their other blatantly illegal “copyright abuse enforcements.” I just don’t wanna see piracy become even more annoying because of fucking leakers peacocking and being called “pirate activists.”

    Again leaks are not piracy. That’s also not how piracy websites work. I’m gonna guess you’re referring to websites allowing you to watch movies and shows for free, those websites are just fancy link aggregates. They do not host any of the pirated content, they just link to it. (Also the content they’re linking to isn’t hosted centrally, further wrapping it in a web that is generally much less worth tracking. Torrents are valuable yes, but only when you don’t do stupid shit like Anna’s.) They maintain that degree of seperation because they are not fucking idiots.

    Hope that cleared some things up for you

    • thax@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
      0·
      2 months ago

      I have mixed feelings. I do support the Swartz-influenced “information should be free” perspective, and I acknowledge that progressing toward that end requires popularizing a sentiment that influences the democratic process, while it still has some teeth.

      But, no doubt popularity casts a spotlight on all data sharing, and link aggregators don’t have as much skin in the game as file hosts. Enabling easy access accelerates the war on information access. Perhaps it’s naive to think piracy and/or information sharing can compete with the deep pockets of capitalist stakeholders. However, I also think this conflict is inevitable as it becomes cheaper and easier to ID all users on a network. I wonder if the time is nigh for the activism that underpins a lot of the information underworld to play out. We are clearly in the acceleration phase of the human arc. Piracy becoming “annoying” is the least of our problems.

      I initially downvoted you but then upvoted because I do think your comment relevant and interesting to think about.