Spotify won court order against Anna's Archive, taking down .org domain

  If I wasn't on Anna's side before, I sure am now.

A) You're quite the poet!

B) We should all be on Anna's side if we're to live up this board's name even a little bit: https://archive.org/stream/GuerillaOpenAccessManifesto/Goamj...

Anna's Archive announced they intended to infringe on the label's copyrights by distributing their music without a license. The law allows the court "to prevent or restrain infringement of a copyright" (emphasis mine).

https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/502#:~:text=Any%2...

unless you have a billion dollars, not sure anyone cares what side you're on.

Voting with your wallet no longer really matters does it unless your wallet is attached to a billion dollar stock portfolio.

> "think is related to some undetermined future nebulously bad thing"

Anna's Archive made threats in writing to distribute, concretely and specifically, the plaintiff's copyrighted works as torrents.

> think is related to some undetermined future nebulously bad thing for their business

The thing in question being "we copied all your data and are now gonna release it for free". I like what Anna's is doing, but come on! This is dishonest communication if I've ever seen it!

Look at this clever hack to get away with committing crimes and there is nothing they can do.

Oh it looks like the justice system isn’t stupid enough to fall for it. Now everyone is angry that the justice system isn’t serious and dumb.

> that they think is related to some undetermined future nebulously bad thing

I mean, Anna's Archive was pretty clear about the future bad thing.

Spotify didn't "think", it wasn't just "related", nothing was "undetermined" or "nebulous".

Anna's Archive explicitly announced they were going to start distributing Spotify's music files. It's not even a case of hosting links to torrents but not seeding -- no, they were going to be doing the seeding too. You can't get more clear-cut than that.

I'm not taking anybody's side here, as to what copyright law ought to be, but Spotify isn't abusing the legal process here.

"Spotify" literally means "put ads on things".

It's not obvious to US English speakers but "spot" was ad industry jargon and became the word for "TV commercial" in several European languages. It's so gross that this ever slid through as a brand for a music app. We've descended so far...Music app branding started with Wesley Willis jokes!

Wikipedia says

  Ek's initial pitch to Lorentzon was not initially related to music, but rather a way for streaming content such as video, digital films, images or music to drive advertising revenue.

So yes, they were always intending to get revenue from ads. And yes, the initial pitch included other types of media too. But I don't think we can call Spotify "an ad platform" that "never actually cared about music" any more than we could call Ars Technica "an ad platform that never actually cared about tech news."

Literally soulseek with ads where some dudes in Stockholm siphon off the lions share of the music industry’s revenues for building a client. The absolute nerve and cheek.

They entered a legal agreement with STIM (Swedish equivalent of RIAA) that allowed them to use whatever during a closed beta period for the artists that that were represented by them.

But I get you, doing research is hard.

IMO also recent and related: NVIDIA Contacted Anna’s Archive to Secure Access to Millions of Pirated Books - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46677628 - Jan 2026 (153 comments)

The harm being done is millions of dollars for VCs and music studios.

Billionaires and enterprises want to see consumers spending to return their investment.

The presence of other - dispersed - illegal material doesn’t diminish said returns too much, this central dump would have set precedent and had garnered massive attention.

This is the capitalist way.

> They're claiming that the archive would have released all the material publicly if they were allowed to know an injunction was about to be filed against them.

I mean, the archive themselves publicly stated their intention to release all the material, without reference to any injunction. So the implication is trivially true, as a logician would say.

> Yet all those songs certainly have illegal copies already being distributed on the internet. So what was the actual harm being prevented here?

There's a huge difference between a ton of individual torrents or files you need to individually search for, identify, of varying quality, that may be mislabeled and have other sorts of quality issues, and which in no way approach "all" music...

...vs a single, shockingly comprehensive repository of uniformly high-quality music which does, in fact, approach "all" music.

If I wanted to start a pirate music service, it would become vastly easier with this particular repository. Many orders of magnitude easier. That's the actual harm.

I will never START paying for Spotify. I like my music and so I like to know my music, I have no problem curating my collection, chasing rare works for artists I really like. I enjoy the process, I enjoy the result, I enjoy that I own it. I really don't see why I would rather spend hundreds a year for the privilege of owning nothing at all in the end, while being prescribed what I shall listen to, when and where.

I'm old enough to have an mp3 collection, so I haven't needed spotify. They don't have 20% of the tracks in my playlist and their integration of local audio has been steadily eroded to be almost unusable now (i.e. it's completely separate, doesn't show up in regular search, playlists etc.). They also push audiobooks and sponsored results in my face even on the Premium subscription, and their UI sucks.

If you already have a collection and are reasonably content in what you listen to, topping it up with a few albums a year is not that hard.

Or just use youtube music!

Many people are cancelling Spotify among my friends, even very "non-technical" folks. For me I've just gone back to radio or Youtube:ing a few songs for free here and there. Paying the cost of a lunch every month is just not worth it anymore for subscription services.

I run a Navidrome server I stream my own music from. I tag everything with Mp3tag and have a shell script to organize and upload the tagged files. Not all of the music I listen to regularly is on Spotify and their treatment of artists is abominable.

>what‘s in it for spotify?

Their relationship with the labels

You have to first find spotify in the court docs: https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.nysd.65...

    ATLANTIC RECORDING CORPORATION;
    ATLANTIC MUSIC GROUP LLC; BAD
    BOY RECORDS LLC; ELEKTRA
    ENTERTAINMENT LLC; ELEKTRA
    ENTERTAINMENT GROUP INC.; FUELED
    BY RAMEN LLC; WARNER MUSIC
    INTERNATIONAL SERVICES LIMITED;
    WARNER RECORDS INC.; WARNER
    RECORDS LLC; SONY MUSIC
    ENTERTAINMENT; ARISTA MUSIC;
    ARISTA RECORDS, LLC; ZOMBA
    RECORDING LLC; UMG RECORDINGS,
    INC.; CAPITOL RECORDS, LLC; and
    SPOTIFY USA INC.,

       Plaintiffs,

ANd then you could read the decision https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.nysd.65...:

    Factual Background - III

    The Record Company Plaintiffs’ business model relies
    in significant part on the licensing of their catalogs of sound recordings
    to legitimate streaming services like Spotify.

IMO Spotify couldn't care less. The actual owners of music care.

Cozy secondary relationships with music labels. Payola goes one way and industry demands go the other.

Since "owners" take such a big chunk (50%) of paid royalties for streaming there is a strong incentive to only play music that is "owned" by labels and not directly by artists and performers. Controlling the number of "spins" an song or album of theirs gets is still a huge concern of the labels.

> what‘s in it for spotify?

Honestly, Spotify itself probably couldn't care less, for the obvious reasons you say.

But the music labels sure do. Their contracts with Spotify surely require it to implement appropriate DRM, stop all attempted piracy, etc. If Spotify wants to be on good negotiating terms with labels, they have absolutely no choice but to take as much legal action as possible.

I put Rockbox on a non-techie friend’s new mp3 player just the other day. Some folks absolutely went back to buying/pirating music after the whole Spotify playing ads for ICE thing. It’s apparently fun curating a collection like in the olden days, and sites like fmhy have gotten pretty popular recently.

Spotify cancelled my subscription. I started off with a Spotify partner subscription with my wife, which grandfathered into some other thing, like a family subscription, and then whatever I had got cancelled. Meanwhile I found a new local radio station has started playing 60% of what I like, some new (to me) joint venture thats a web first marketing company and they bought a bunch of radio stations to add local radio advertising to their list of services. Between spotify with ads, radio with ads, I am listening to radio, while planning out how to most easily go back to just having my favourites on my phone or maybe even an mp3 player.

IF I were still a Spotify user - this would be the nail in the coffin. Not that the founder wouldn't give me enough reason. But they lost me due to other reasons.

I am still paying for streaming, though. Still. Not sure if it is really worth it - and once I have my local mp3 collection available for myself - not sure, if I need a paid streaming service. I am getting too old and I return more and more to the songs I grew up with. And to be honest - if I would be missing anything, I could easily yt-dlp it, store it on my server and have it available ti myself via self hosted streaming.

I am loosing more and more interest in streaming. For video and music.

I think the main use-case for the metadata-enriched 300TB archive is training AI models like suno. Anyone torrenting music for personal consumption had higher quality sources available already.

> i can‘t think of a single person who‘d stop paying for streaming services (music) in favour of going back to illegally download or (or even legally purchase) songs

I'd love to self host my music, but curating my collection is a lot of work. I made several attempts, but looking for music I like was too much work for me. If getting "illegal" music becomes easier I'll definitely eventually do this.