Anna's Archive is sued for $13T | Hacker News Reader

Anna's Archive is sued for $13T

nme.com

24 pointsantonmks13 comments

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

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.

Didn't (Nvidia, Meta, etc.) use Anna's archive to train their ML models?

Certain companies may have attractively deep pockets while being located in the US for enforcement of statutory damages.

See also: "Extracting books from production language models" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46569799

Saw that one. The 96% regurgitation rate on Harry Potter by Claude was pretty damning. Verbatim. That was the caveat that really got me. Figured they were being kind of lenient initially, then later they showed what "didn't qualify."

  glimpsed a pale shape moving through the trees. (actual text)

  just at the edge of sight—a pale shape, slipping between the trunks (not extraction)

"brief examples of text generated by GPT-4.1 in the Phase 2 continuation loop that are not extraction, and do not contribute to m (and thus also not nv-recall)"

And, yes, Nvidia's in the middle of a class action lawsuit for using Anna's Archive. Mildly funny. They even warned Nvidia it was illegal "You realize this is all pirated material, right?"

Court Filing: https://torrentfreak.com/images/naznvid-amend.pdf

Tom's: https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/artificial-intell...

Digital Music: https://www.digitalmusicnews.com/2026/01/23/nvidia-accused-o...

Meta's apparently also, yet it hasn't resulted in a court case, yet. Also kind of funny. "Torrenting from a corporate laptop doesn’t feel right. LOL Emoji" 82TB of data with a decent amount from Anna's Archive.

Tom's: https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/artificial-intell...

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.

130 evil pinkies

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.

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.

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”.

They just need to announce they are using it to train AI model. Albeit very very slowly and it will be fair use. Isn't that the current state of copy right in USA?

It was already in <s>"The Simpsons"</s> "Accelerando"

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