The three major record labels, and Spotify, are suing Anna’s Archive for a mind-boggling $13.4 trillion, alleging that the site has illegally scraped more than 86 million sound files.
That is a lot of money. For context, the GDP of the whole of the United Kingdom is currently $4.25 trillion. For the US that figure stands at $24 trillion.
So what is Anna’s Archive? Well, they are another, somewhat elicit, startup who seem to be doing what startups do: moving fast and breaking stuff. Initially, this was focused on pirating books and papers, though they deny that term. Instead, they describe what they’re doing as “preserving humanity’s knowledge and culture” and say they aim to “build a music archive primarily aimed at preservation.”
However, they have since moved on to pirating music, which has brought them into conflict with the record industry. In a statement given to Billboard last month, a Spotify spokesperson said: “Spotify has identified and disabled the nefarious user accounts that engaged in unlawful scraping. We’ve implemented new safeguards for these types of anti-copyright attacks and are actively monitoring for suspicious behaviour. Since day one, we have stood with the artist community against piracy, and we are actively working with our industry partners to protect creators and defend their rights.”
Anna’s Archive has denied piracy, saying that it does not directly host any files and the music is distributed on peer-to-peer networks. The scraping though, is on an industrial scale – some 86 million files, which is thought to be nearly all the world’s commercial sound recordings.
