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.
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.
In mid-January, a broader injunction followed, which also covers operators such as Cloudflare and requires them to stop access to the copyrighted material. Shortly thereafter, Anna’s Archives’ special section for Spotify downloads was removed and marked as unavailable. The legal process is still ongoing.
This article originally appeared on ComputerSweden.
