Shocking. Absolutely riveting outcome that wasn’t expected whatsoever. /s
That being said though, the weirder part for me is the fact that apparently they weren’t able to obtain the operatives behind the website. So this was essentially a court case that was filed, put into session and then given judgment without even ever identifying the defendants that are on trial.
That seems really weird to me.
Meanwhile, on Epstein Island…
Tl;dr: It’s “give us $300 million (which we know you won’t do), or we’ll order everyone involved in hosting your site to give up your name and address.”
For now, the monetary judgment is mostly a victory on paper, as recouping money from an unknown entity is impossible. For this reason, the music companies also requested a permanent injunction.
Permanent Injunction Targets Domains In addition to the damages award, Rakoff entered a permanent worldwide injunction covering ten Anna’s Archive domains: annas-archive.org, .li, .se, .in, .pm, .gl, .ch, .pk, .gd, and .vg.
Domain registries and registrars of record, along with hosting and internet service providers, are ordered to permanently disable access to those domains, disable authoritative nameservers, cease hosting services, and preserve evidence that could identify the site’s operators.
The judgment names specific third parties bound by those obligations, including Public Interest Registry, Cloudflare, Switch Foundation, The Swedish Internet Foundation, Njalla SRL, IQWeb FZ-LLC, Immaterialism Ltd., Hosting Concepts B.V., Tucows Domains Inc., and OwnRegistrar, Inc.
Anna’s Archive is also ordered to destroy all copies of works scraped from Spotify and to file a compliance report within ten business days, under penalty of perjury, including valid contact information for the site and its managing agents. That last requirement could prove significant, given that the identity of the site’s operators remains unknown.
A Way Out, at a Price In theory, Anna’s Archive has the option to prevent the domain suspension. The permanent injunction allows the site to seek relief from this measure, after showing that it has paid the full $322 million damages award and complied with all injunctive obligations.
That’s an unlikely option, to say the least. At the same time, however, it is not guaranteed that the site’s domain names will be suspended.
As reported previously, several domain names, including the Greenland-based .gl version, are linked to registries and registrars outside the jurisdiction of the U.S. court. As such, they previously did not comply to the preliminary injunction, and it is unknown whether the latest order changes that.
Why are we working with centralized domain registers that capitulate to governments like this?
entered a permanent worldwide injunction
Anna’s Archive should hire this same lawyer.
AFAIK they haven’t even posted the music. Only the metadata.
5 years later
“What music? It was all a bluff.”
Hopefully non-US registrars and governments will stand up to this abuse.
Those labels didn’t suffer any damage. That’s all money to line their pockets and push more AI slop, not to benefit human creators.
On the bright side, they’re unlikely to see a penny from it, and have incurred lawyer costs and time.
True. Hopefully they spent lots on outside law firms. They’ll get paid unless they stupidly said they’ll just take a cut of the damages, like injury firms do.
I’m sure it’ll be a tax right off
Exactly. Spotifys value is in the convenient access to the content and its playlist curation. Who cares if all the music got downloaded, they didn’t lose one single customer from it.
Not that it matters since this isn’t going to get paid anyway but funny that the bulk of the judgement is to be paid to Spotify for building a shitty service rather than the rights holders of the music.
Don’t they need to find the owner to actually do the fine?
Or they’ll have an excuse to go hard core after them on an international level, because they are now wanted.
How can I help?
Spotify and record labels have headquarters…
…and making molotovs is easy, from what I hear.
One part coke, two parts rum.
Do not, i repeat, DO NOT exchange the first for heating oil and the second for gas.
Danke Michael Elf Mayer.
Cheaper than this lawsuit, for sure.
I recently had this conversation in another community and unrealized that I have too much to lose. 💀 How about just keep seeding? 🤣
