Saving people a few clicks, lawsuit PDF here.

https://www.musicbusinessworldwide.com/files/2026/01/Annas-A...

IANAL but I'm assuming their use of the word "theft" is purely for rhetorical effect--perhaps with an eye towards their demanded jury-trial--since most "theft" definitions require an intent to deprive, meaning it wouldn't apply to someone creating their own replica.

    COMPLAINT FOR:
    (1) Direct Copyright Infringement
    (2) Breach of Contract
    (3) Violation of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, 18 U.S.C. § 1030
    (4) Violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, 17 U.S.C. § 1201
    JURY TRIAL DEMANDED

I briefly looked over the PDF, but I'm not a lawyer. If I understand correctly, they're suing "DOES 1 through 10".

So, I'm assuming they're hoping for a "default judgment" against Anna's Archive, and then they'll presumably start taking domain names and any other hosting resources?

Then, I assume in the end, nothing will really change, just like The Pirate Bay still exists in the open on a series of rotating domains.

But at least the lawyers will be able to justify their job.

So, they're suing Anna' Archive for $13T...

  - The combined market cap of NVidia ($4.35T), Apple ($3.88T), and Google (Goog, $1.9T+Googl, $3.62T) shares combined.
  - An amount larger than Every world stock market on Earth, except the NYSE and NASDAQ (the next closest is Shanghai at $9T)
  - ~5 months worth of all trades (market volume) on the NYSE ($2.685T/month)
  - ~1/10th of ALL world stock markets market capitalization.
  - ~1/2 the United States yearly Gross Domestic Product
  - 130x Spotify's own market capitalization (total stock value outstanding)
  - ~766x Spotify's own yearly revenue for 2024 ($16.96B)

Just sue them for a gazillion quadrillion dollars or something. "Yes, judge. We estimate our damages at 1/10th of the entire world stock market, or approximately half the United States total economic output" Be difficult not to laugh at these people.

Fun fact: Daniel Ek just before founding Spotify was CEO of μTorrent. You will never guess what he used as initial music library for Spotify.

Wheel of life I guess.

To put that in perspective, $13T is 130x the amount Dr. Evil held the world ransom for in Austin Powers.

I am personally not a very big fan of Spotify for a variety of reasons, I would not be against them losing this lawsuit. Especially with their moves toward AI, they seem to have very little respect for this media they claim to be defending.

For a less-serious but similar situation, Jason Scott (textfiles.com, Internet Archive) gave a hilarious DEFCON talk called "That Awesome Time I Was Sued For Two Billion Dollars":

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KSWqx8goqSY

Spotify and the three main major record labels sue Anna’s Archive for $13trillion for “brazen theft of millions of files containing nearly all of the world’s commercial sound recordings”.