Spotify lawsuit behind shutdown of pirate library domains

A lawsuit filed by Spotify and several major record labels was behind the shutdown of several of Anna’s Archive’s domains earlier this year. This is according to recently published documents from a federal court in the US, reports Torrentfreak.

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The background to this is that in December 2025, Anna’s Archive stated that the site had backed up Spotify and planned to release large amounts of collected data. According to the lawsuit, the archive circumvented Spotify’s DRM and scraped metadata and audio files linked to hundreds of millions of songs.

On December 29, Spotify, together with companies such as Universal, Sony, and Warner, filed a sealed lawsuit in New York. Shortly thereafter, the court issued a temporary order targeting domain registrars, web hosts, and other intermediaries, which led to the shutdown of Anna’s Archive’s .org and .se domains in early January. Among the recipients of the order was the Swedish Internet Foundation.

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AndyC

Andy Curtis is an award-winning security consultant, researcher and public speaker. He has been working in the computer security industry since the early 1990s, having been employed by state and federal government, leading healthcare and banking providers across three continents. He has given talks about computer security for some of the world’s largest companies, worked with law enforcement agencies on investigations into hacking groups, and is a regular voice on TV and radio explaining IT security threats.

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