[HN Gopher] Spotify won court order against Anna's Archive, taki...
___________________________________________________________________
Spotify won court order against Anna's Archive, taking down .org
domain
Author : voxadam
Score : 86 points
Date : 2026-01-21 20:52 UTC (2 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (arstechnica.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (arstechnica.com)
| ChrisArchitect wrote:
| Previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46497164
| ronsor wrote:
| Unfortunately for Spotify, court orders are ineffective against
| foreign nationals sharing information. Copyright enforcement is
| as futile as the encryption "export restrictions" the US and
| other countries tried in the 90s and early 2000s.
| snowmobile wrote:
| Since they don't "own" the data they lost, only "rent" it, they
| probably have to be seen doing something about it, lest they
| face the wrath of record companies.
| JasonADrury wrote:
| I have a really hard time imagining the record companies
| giving a shit about this, this isn't a pre-release leak. All
| the valuable content is already freely and easily available
| for download on the internet.
| Nextgrid wrote:
| It's performance art all the way down - it repeatedly
| states they are not happy about piracy and will come after
| anyone doing it.
|
| This isn't aimed at pirates as much as it's aimed at non-
| pirates, especially companies with significant assets.
|
| They know full well pirates don't care, but it's a message
| to any company or entity seen as "too friendly" with
| pirates or that enables pirates to do their thing.
| cryzinger wrote:
| Yeah, but TFA notes how Anna's Archive is dependent on US-based
| infrastructure, including Cloudflare.
|
| As much as I love Anna's Archive, I feel like this Spotify move
| was a misstep on their part. The music industry seems _far_
| scarier than the publishing industry when it comes to copyright
| suits, which means they have a lot to lose here by poking the
| bear, but there are already plenty of places to find pirated
| music, which means they also don 't have much to gain.
| endofreach wrote:
| what's in it for spotify? i can't think of a single person who'd
| stop paying for streaming services (music) in favour of going
| back to illegally download or (or even legally purchase) songs &
| managing their own library. m a y b e some devs would. but those
| thinking about it, wouldn't be stopped like that. i am thinking
| about it, yet i just renewed my subscription because i lack time
| & motivation to crawl down yet another rabbit hole of diy.
| snowmobile wrote:
| Many people are cancelling Spotify among my friends, even very
| "non-technical" folks. For me I've just gone back to radio or
| Youtube:ing a few songs for free here and there. Paying the
| cost of a lunch every month is just not worth it anymore for
| subscription services.
| ulrashida wrote:
| Exactly this. Increasing prices with worsening service and
| feature bloat combined with questionable ethics made it an
| easy decision to cancel.
| parpfish wrote:
| This is also a big party of why artists don't earn shit.
|
| Spotify will never be able to pay out enough if people don't
| think this music is worth paying for.
|
| They want access to every new album but refuse to pay how
| much a single new CD would have cost back in the day
| writebetterc wrote:
| > This is also a big party of why artists don't earn shit.
|
| The pie that Spotify divides up among the artists is a
| global one. It's not like you listen to one artist, so they
| get your 10 bucks every month. You're paying Taylor Swift,
| even though you never listen to her.
| parpfish wrote:
| Their prorata payment scheme isn't inherently old or bad.
|
| If I listen to obscure indie band all month, some of my
| money will go to Taylor swift. But all those swifties are
| also paying obscure indie band.
| pluralmonad wrote:
| Aside from all the middle men nibbling at artist take, its
| also a symptom of trading on fundamentally un-scarce
| resources. A better business model is selling access to the
| scarce things like the artist themselves. Trying to
| maintain stranglehold on a particular order of zeros and
| ones is always going to be tough.
| doesnt_know wrote:
| Every entertainment market is saturated. Even if every
| creative endeavour stopped now, there would still be more
| freely available content to last more then any individual
| human life span.
|
| Unless you're the type of person that actively considers
| them a fan of something and goes out of their way to
| consume a specific niche, there isn't much reason to pay
| much, or anything for entertainment.
| kilroy123 wrote:
| I know people who recently canceled, but I think it has more
| to do with them raising the price.
| snowmobile wrote:
| Yeah I'm not saying my friends who cancelled are going to
| torrent music like it's the 2000's, but when so much music
| is freely available on the web, why pay? For me it was
| mainly that the app kept getting worse though.
| whywhywhywhy wrote:
| >what's in it for spotify?
|
| Their relationship with the labels
| ezst wrote:
| I will never START paying for Spotify. I like my music and so I
| like to know my music, I have no problem curating my
| collection, chasing rare works for artists I really like. I
| enjoy the process, I enjoy the result, I enjoy that I own it. I
| really don't see why I would rather spend hundreds a year for
| the privilege of owning nothing at all in the end, while being
| prescribed what I shall listen to, when and where.
| lukan wrote:
| My old mp3 collection is too big for my mobile phone and I
| did not set up a private streaming solution yet. So out of
| convenience, I also used spotify. Stream anywhere anything is
| nice.
|
| And I did enjoy finding new artists through the algorithm
| there .. but I do made up my mind about letting go of the
| concenience and owning all my music again. It is a big
| effort, though and I don't enjoy it so much like you.
| sdoering wrote:
| IF I were still a Spotify user - this would be the nail in the
| coffin. Not that the founder wouldn't give me enough reason.
| But they lost me due to other reasons.
|
| I am still paying for streaming, though. Still. Not sure if it
| is really worth it - and once I have my local mp3 collection
| available for myself - not sure, if I need a paid streaming
| service. I am getting too old and I return more and more to the
| songs I grew up with. And to be honest - if I would be missing
| anything, I could easily yt-dlp it, store it on my server and
| have it available ti myself via self hosted streaming.
|
| I am loosing more and more interest in streaming. For video and
| music.
| cdrnsf wrote:
| I run a Navidrome server I stream my own music from. I tag
| everything with Mp3tag and have a shell script to organize and
| upload the tagged files. Not all of the music I listen to
| regularly is on Spotify and their treatment of artists is
| abominable.
| subdavis wrote:
| How much piracy do you do?
| cdrnsf wrote:
| I've ripped and archived CDs for well over a decade,
| purchase from Bandcamp and -- if I can't find a way to buy
| it -- I'll find it and buy a shirt or something from the
| band as directly as possible.
| CryptoBanker wrote:
| Perhaps worried about downloads being used for training music
| models
| hsbauauvhabzb wrote:
| Can't have competitors when they inevitably move in that
| direction themselves.
| rjh29 wrote:
| I'm old enough to have an mp3 collection, so I haven't needed
| spotify. They don't have 20% of the tracks in my playlist and
| their integration of local audio has been steadily eroded to be
| almost unusable now (i.e. it's completely separate, doesn't
| show up in regular search, playlists etc.). They also push
| audiobooks and sponsored results in my face even on the Premium
| subscription, and their UI sucks.
|
| If you already have a collection and are reasonably content in
| what you listen to, topping it up with a few albums a year is
| not that hard.
|
| Or just use youtube music!
| themafia wrote:
| Cozy secondary relationships with music labels. Payola goes one
| way and industry demands go the other.
|
| Since "owners" take such a big chunk (50%) of paid royalties
| for streaming there is a strong incentive to only play music
| that is "owned" by labels and not directly by artists and
| performers. Controlling the number of "spins" an song or album
| of theirs gets is still a huge concern of the labels.
| have_faith wrote:
| I cancelled my Spotify the other day in favour of listening to
| my own archive. I'm admittedly an outlier though.
| jrflowers wrote:
| I put Rockbox on a non-techie friend's new mp3 player just the
| other day. Some folks absolutely went back to buying/pirating
| music after the whole Spotify playing ads for ICE thing. It's
| apparently fun curating a collection like in the olden days,
| and sites like fmhy have gotten pretty popular recently.
| dang wrote:
| Recent and related. Others?
|
| _Anna 's Archive loses .org domain after surprise suspension_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46497164 - Jan 2026 (358
| comments)
|
| _Spotify reportedly investigating Anna 's Archive's scraping of
| their library_ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46355793 -
| Dec 2025 (82 comments)
|
| _Backing up Spotify_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46338339 - Dec 2025 (701
| comments)
| akersten wrote:
| But you can't even download the allegedly infringing material
| from the .org site. You can just read about it? So they're
| abusing the All Writs Act to take down a site that they think is
| related to some undetermined future nebulously bad thing for
| their business. If I wasn't on Anna's side before, I sure am now.
| cyanydeez wrote:
| unless you have a billion dollars, not sure anyone cares what
| side you're on.
|
| Voting with your wallet no longer really matters does it unless
| your wallet is attached to a billion dollar stock portfolio.
| crazygringo wrote:
| > _that they think is related to some undetermined future
| nebulously bad thing_
|
| I mean, Anna's Archive was pretty clear about the future bad
| thing.
|
| Spotify didn't "think", it wasn't just "related", nothing was
| "undetermined" or "nebulous".
|
| Anna's Archive explicitly announced they were going to start
| distributing Spotify's music files. It's not even a case of
| hosting links to torrents but not seeding -- no, they were
| going to be doing the seeding too. You can't get more clear-cut
| than that.
|
| I'm not taking anybody's side here, as to what copyright law
| ought to be, but Spotify isn't abusing the legal _process_
| here.
| Supermancho wrote:
| > Anna's Archive explicitly announced they were going to
| start distributing Spotify's music files. It's not even a
| case of hosting links to torrents but not seeding -- no, they
| were going to be doing the seeding too. You can't get more
| clear-cut than that.
|
| You can get more "clear cut" than that. You could rule when
| there were damages or law was actually broken. Committing a
| crime is not the same as saying you will commit a crime. ie.
| I will rob the bank on the Chase Bank Kraemer Branch in
| Orange County. Now try and prosecute me. Yes, I understand
| this would fall under criminal vs civil. The issue is about
| the law being applied in the way the benefits the ones with
| the most money, more often than not, violating equal
| protections and further eroding public confidence in the US
| legal system.
| crazygringo wrote:
| > _Actually committing a crime is not the same as saying
| you will commit a crime._
|
| No, but it can have a lot of legal repercussions, like
| restraining orders, you can be arrested for making a
| threat, search warrants may be issued... and in the case of
| corporations, restraining orders and injunctions. Like
| here.
| bbor wrote:
| If I wasn't on Anna's side before, I sure am now.
|
| A) You're quite the poet!
|
| B) We should _all_ be on Anna 's side if we're to live up this
| board's name even a little bit:
| https://archive.org/stream/GuerillaOpenAccessManifesto/Goamj...
| franze wrote:
| Deezer has in its onboarding flow a pretty cool "get your lists
| from spotify" feature. from all liked/currated songs - a few
| thousands - it could not match about 2.
| DyslexicAtheist wrote:
| could you expand on this please? if I understood correctly then
| Deezer fails to match songs from a list of thousands? thanks
| xvokcarts wrote:
| I understood it as out of a few thousand songs, Deezer only
| failed to match 2.
| walthamstow wrote:
| You can also download FLAC or 320k MP3 from Deezer with deemix.
| xmonkee wrote:
| Technical question: I run my own Pi hole dns server. Is it
| possible to just add an A record for it? What are you guys doing
| to get around this?
| Banditoz wrote:
| Wikipedia has a list of active domains:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anna%27s_Archive
| stock_toaster wrote:
| There are some alternate domains listed on wikipedia [1].
|
| [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anna%27s_Archive
| cdrnsf wrote:
| Pretty ironic considering they bootstrapped the service with
| pirated music. But they've never actually cared about music --
| they started as an ad platform and music was the cheapest option
| for them to attract eyeballs.
| holmesworcester wrote:
| "Spotify" literally means "put ads on things".
|
| It's not obvious to US English speakers but "spot" was ad
| industry jargon and became the word for "TV commercial" in
| several European languages. It's so gross that this ever slid
| through as a brand for a music app. We've descended so
| far...Music app branding started with Wesley Willis jokes!
| crazygringo wrote:
| That's a fun theory but there's no evidence that was their
| intention with the name...
|
| From what they've said, it's about "spotting" and
| "identifying" music and music trends. But it seems like
| mostly it was just a somewhat nonsense word that was easy to
| remember and whose domain name was available.
|
| Especially since it's popular as a paid service _without
| ads_.
| bbor wrote:
| I love random folk etymologies, especially when they posit
| sinister conspiracies along the way -- thanks for the
| concise correction. Wikipedia confirms on both counts:
| According to Ek, the company's title was initially misheard
| from a name shouted by Lorentzon. Later they conceived a
| portmanteau of "spot" and "identify".
|
| It also kinda blows my mind how common it is to listen to a
| ton of Spotify without paying, NGL! It just seems like such
| an absurd value proposition to me, even now as it matures
| from its growth days. _All_ music??
| asveikau wrote:
| My first language is US English and I am familiar with that
| usage of the word "spot", but didn't make the connection to
| "Spotify" until reading your comment.
|
| This reminds me of the phenomenon of imported words being
| used in another language, but using a less common definitions
| of the word. For example I'm told "Oldtimer" is a vintage car
| in German, but most Americans would say it was an older or
| experienced person. Maybe "Spotify" could also mean something
| giving you acne.
| themafia wrote:
| I don't understand the sealing and ex-parte motions in this case.
| It looks completely corrupt. They're claiming that the archive
| would have released all the material publicly if they were
| allowed to know an injunction was about to be filed against them.
|
| Yet all those songs certainly have illegal copies already being
| distributed on the internet. So what was the actual harm being
| prevented here? I cannot understand how they hoodwinked a court
| into this misguided procedure.
| thenaturalist wrote:
| The harm being done is millions of dollars for VCs and music
| studios.
|
| Billionaires and enterprises want to see consumers spending to
| return their investment.
|
| The presence of other - dispersed - illegal material doesn't
| diminish said returns too much, this central dump would have
| set precedent and had garnered massive attention.
|
| This is the capitalist way.
| crumpled wrote:
| The Wikipedia page for Anna's archive was a lot more helpful
| leading people to the goods than the .org domain was.
|
| Anna always knew the .org domain was vulnerable. Why wouldn't
| they?
| seany wrote:
| Why aren't they distributing things via i2p or something like it
| instead of clearnet?
| alessandroberna wrote:
| Seems that the Spotify torrents are now unavailable until further
| notice. bummer
| heraldgeezer wrote:
| Funny how .se is up
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2026-01-21 23:00 UTC)