A U.S. federal judge on Tuesday awarded Spotify and the three major labels $322 million in a default judgment against Anna's Archive, but only $22.2 million of that figure came from copyright infringement. The remaining $300 million was awarded to Spotify alone under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act's anti-circumvention provisions, a claim that doesn’t require the plaintiff to own the underlying works.
Judge Jed S. Rakoff of the Southern District of New York entered the judgment after the anonymous operators of Anna's Archive failed to appear. The site had announced in December that it scraped 86 million files from Spotify and intended to distribute them via BitTorrent, prompting a January lawsuit from Spotify, Universal Music Group, Sony Music Entertainment, and Warner Music Group.
