Spotify won court order against Anna’s Archive, taking down .org domain | Lawsuit was filed under seal; Anna’s Archive wasn’t notified until after takedown.
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/01/annas-archive-said-spotify-scrape-didnt-cause-domain-suspension-it-was-wrong/
27 Comments
Idk if this is an unpopular opinion, but scraping/archiving Spotify of all places is a dumb idea to begin with. Spotify has only recently done the jump to lossless, and I’m sure a huge part of their catalog is still lossy. They do NOT have hi-res audio at all. What’s the point of creating a backup of something like that? It’s like archiving movies in 720p rips.
If you want to archive media, archive it in the best possible, reference quality. Anything else has little greater value. You’d want to look at Qobuz and/or disc rips when it comes to music.
I’m not surprised they won in the first place
Is that not a 6th amendment violation?
The whole idea of being able to file a lawsuit, and the defendant not even knowing it is happening, let alone being able to plead a defence, is abhorrent to me. I hope Anna’s Archives doubles down and torrents everything.
But it’s OK for big AI to ~~scrape~~ steal the world and monetize it.
Deeply fraudulent legal maneuver, doubt this is legitimate. Companies think only they will be able to do this, otherwise it wouldn’t exist
This whole thing is a mess of Anna’s Archives own making. Right up there with the Internet Archives digital book lending program that they unilaterally decided to implement without sign off from the actual copyright holders of those works.
Does copyright in this country need to be reformed? Yes. But as it stands everyone knows the score and getting so high on your own supply that you decide to pirate a snapshot in time copy of probably the most popular legal music streaming services entire library, and then publicly brag about it is next level ego. What did they think was going to happen?
Fucking edge lords getting to think they are untouchable and ruining a good thing for everyone.
Fuuuuuckkk youuuu Spotify.
From underdog to hero to villain.
lol close but no cigar. them torrents gonna show up no matter what you do.
Spotify doing this while they allow and encourage ai slop thats stolen from actual human artists on their platform…
Spotify has no problem lettings fascists advertise on their platform. Fuck fascists and fuck collaborators.
So glad I canceled already.
From the coldest bays to the most distant atolls, taking to the high seas is now a moral imperative
You can’t hate Spotify enough…
Spotify: “Hold my nonsensical lawsuit”
Lmao. Spotify is only drawing more attention to the data set. They don’t understand how easily copies are made.
hmm, this develo**PM**ent makes me wish we had a **LI**st of fallback doma**IN**s to access annas-archive. oh, wait!
Rip my premier access to epub novels
Capitalism wins again. Imagine getting sued and not notified until the being ordered to shutdown.
I don’t understand why they bragged about it after they did it
Apparently spotify never heard of barbara striessand.
Classic move, hit em with the seal before they even know whats coming
you cant sue a magnet link
This is a complete joke on so many levels. Anna’s not getting notified but also spotify it self started by illegally distributing content it didn’t own
My favorite thing about this whole lawsuit is the Streisand effect. There are people today who didn’t know about Anna’s Archive yesterday, but they do now because this is in the news cycle. And a percentage of people will use it to download stuff. And a percentage of those people will actually host torrents for it. This is practically free marketing because the takedown did absolutely nothing.
Time to sail, Mateys
It’s funny how if your rich and powerful you can get away with almost anything, huh?
If this was Disney guaranteed court doesn’t rule this way
lol as if this changes anything.
Too bad laws don’t matter anymore
We should start destroying American companies one at a time