IP Law Daily, COPYRIGHT—S.D.N.Y.: Record labels and Spotify earn a default judgment against Anna’s Archive, (Apr 15, 2026)

By Matthew Hersh, J.D.

The Liberian-based company never responded to the complaint.

An anonymous website once known as the Pirate Library Mirror has been hit with a $322 million judgment after it failed to respond to a copyright infringement and Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) complaint by Spotify and major music labels, the federal court for Manhattan has held. The judgment, which the music industry plaintiffs are unlikely to ever collect, comes after the Liberian-based company failed to respond to the complaint (Atlantic Recording Corp. v. Archive, No. 1:26-cv-00002-JSR (S.D.N.Y. Apr. 14, 2026)).

The lawsuit took aim at Anna’s Archive, a notorious open-source search engine for so-called “shadow libraries” of copyrighted materials. The archive, which is run anonymously and whose only physical address is ostensibly in Liberia, aggregates a wide range of content from predecessor archives Z-Library, Sci-Hub, and Library Genesis. The archive, which originally focused on content from copyrighted books, was (according to its website) “launched in direct response to law enforcement efforts, formally assisted by The Publishers Association and the Authors Guild, to close down the Z-Library website in November 2022.”

The music industry’s complaint, which, among other claims, brings charges of copyright infringement and violations of the DMCA, alleges that the archive has now branched out from books to music. Indeed, the complaint asserts, the archive now allegedly hosts of millions of files containing “nearly all of the world’s commercial sound recordings.” The archive has also allegedly scraped the metadata for about 256 million audio tracks—“e.g., artist, album, and track name,” the complaint describes—as well as 86 million music files from Spotify. The archive has already released the metadata it unlawfully scraped, the complaint asserts, and has allegedly “threatened to imminently mass-release and freely distribute its pirated copies of the sound recording files to the public, without authorization from or compensation to the relevant rights holders.”

The default judgment, which implements to the letter the order drafted and sought by the music industry plaintiffs, imposes whopping financial penalties on the pirate website. Spotify was the biggest beneficiary (at least on paper) of the court’s order, being awarded $2,500 for each of the 120,000 files whose metadata was allegedly scraped in violation of the DMCA. The record label plaintiffs, who had a much smaller number of works formally at issue in the complaint, were each awarded $7.5 million. The judgment also makes permanent the temporary injunction previously awarded to the music industry plaintiffs.

The Case is No. 1:26-cv-00002-JSR.

Judge: Rakoff, J.

Attorneys: Lauren Marie De Lilly (Sidley Austin LLP) for Atlantic Recording Corp.

Companies: Atlantic Recording Corp.; Anna's Archive

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