Spotify and the Big 3 record labels - Universal Music Group, Sony Music Entertainment, and Warner Music Group - have filed a lawsuit against Anna's Archive, alleging the pirate platform scraped 86 million music files, and claiming an eye-popping $13 trillion in damages. Anna's Archive, formerly known as the Pirate Library Mirror, is accused of "brazen theft of millions of files containing nearly all of the world's commercial sound recordings," according to the full complaint.
In an audacious action starting to attract media attention, last month a group of piracy actors called Anna's Archive copied about 86 million music files from Spotify. The intention was to release the hoard on the BitTorrent file-sharing platform. All three of the major labels (UMG, Sony Music Entertainment, and Warner Music Group), along with Spotify, launched the unsurprising lawsuit in September. The presiding judge, Jed . Rakoff, issued an injunction (HERE).
Quick: tell me how old you are by telling me which app you used to download free music. Was it Napster? Kazaa? Usenet? Gnutella? WinMX? Morpheus? The Pirate Bay? Were you, I don't know, sending your friends songs on AIM or BBM? The possibilities are endless. For a decade or so, if you were online, you were probably stealing music.
