Music
Another one bites the dust: Anna’s Archive domains are being pulled down following a federal court’s web-hosting-focused preliminary injunction.
Music It turns out allegedly scraping Spotify’s entire library wasn’t a great idea. Now, the major labels and the DSP itself have hit Anna’s Archive, the alleged “notorious pirate website” behind the purported “theft of millions of music files,” with a lawsuit and an injunction.
Universal Music, Sony Music, Warner Music, and Spotify just recently submitted that straightforward complaint to a New York federal court. As many already know, Anna’s Archive closed out 2025 by proclaiming that it’d “archived around 86 million music files, representing around 99.6% of listens,” from Spotify.
Additionally, the involved hackers released the corresponding metadata and confirmed plans to drop the actual files “in order of popularity.”
Unsurprisingly, the “brazen theft” isn’t sitting right with the industry powers that be, who’ve criticized the episode as “a calculated effort to flagrantly undermine and interfere with” their rights en route to spurring “‘donations’ for Anna’s Archive.”
“Anna’s Archive also profits from its illegal conduct,” the suit reads. “It solicits users to provide anonymous ‘donations’ of between $2 per month and $100 per month using untraceable methods… For the copyrighted content hosted directly by Anna’s Archive, download speeds for free users on Anna’s Archive are typically very slow. However, in exchange for a ‘donation,’ users receive ‘fast downloads’ and avoid waitlists.”
At the top level, the plaintiffs are litigating over the relevant recordings’ alleged infringement. And on Spotify’s end, the Anna’s Archive hackers are said to have facilitated the alleged scraping scheme through “thousands of accounts” – thereby allegedly violating the DSP’s terms and eliciting a breach of contract claim here.
(Last month, Spotify told us that it’d “identified and disabled the nefarious user accounts that engaged in unlawful scraping.” A reasonable question in light of the Anna’s Archive fiasco: how many other nefarious accounts are still lurking on the platform?)
Spotify is also suing for an alleged violation of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act; Anna’s Archive allegedly “accessed Spotify’s protected computers without authorization” while aiming “to defraud.”
Finally, the DMCA’s anti-circumvention provision is once again taking center stage; all the plaintiffs maintain that Anna’s Archive “circumvented technological measures that effectively control access to protected works, including by using thousands of accounts to mask its usage as ordinary user behavior and by decrypting encrypted audio files and removing DRM.”
Regarding relief, despite acknowledging that the hackers likely reside outside the States and that their identities aren’t publicly known, the majors are seeking damages, the destruction of the allegedly scraped files, a multifaceted permanent injunction, and more.
In an order that hit the docket yesterday, Judge Jed Rakoff in more words confirmed that the filing parties would likely prevail on the merits. Consequently, he expanded on a temporary restraining order with a sweeping preliminary injunction preventing any person or company from “hosting, linking to, distributing,” or making available for download the allegedly scraped recordings.
More interestingly, the court further barred “any step that results in the transfer of the registration of any of the domain names of Anna’s Archive” sites “to any other registrant or registrar.”
Plus, “all domain name registries and registrars of record for” the sites, along with “all hosting and internet service providers for Anna’s Archive,” are prohibited from providing “any hosting services” to the defendant.
With Cloudflare, the National Internet Exchange of India, and others directly mentioned, known Anna’s Archive hosts and ISPs must “reasonably assist in” the order’s implementation, Judge Rakoff spelled out.
Bearing as much in mind, Redditors are noting the takedown of multiple Anna’s Archive domains and lamenting organizers’ decision to expand their focus beyond books and academic papers. Technically, the domain-name challenges surfaced closer to January’s beginning, but Anna’s Archive at the time dismissed them as unrelated to the Spotify scrape.