Spotify was recently hacked by the pirate activist group known as Anna's Archive, with 300TB of its music library being taken to its site. Anna's or Anna's Archive was founded in 2022 and is now considered to be the world's largest shadow library. Little is known about the activist group, since they are in violation of digital copyright laws throughout the world and operate anonymously.As per Built in, shadow libraries or pirate libraries are libraries that make available paid content for free, bypassing copyright laws and guidelines. They are named shadow libraries because of their illegality and need to operate outside of laws and regulations.Anna's Archive aims to catalog all books in existence, with one particular blog post by the archive pointing out that more data is stored in written text than in any other form. The Archive emerged out of the Pirate Library Mirror (PiLiMi) project, which started in response to the US government's crackdown on the Z Library, which included the arrest of Russian nationals Anton Napolsky and Valeriia Ermakova.Z Library's decline led a group of anonymous archivists to launch Anna's Archive, bringing in Z Library's catalog alongside the catalogs of databases such as Sci-Hub and Library Genesis into a single site. The site also has datasets from Internet Archive, Z Library Chinese, DuXiu, MagzDB, Nexus, Hathi Trust, as well as World Cat, and more.Now it has added Spotify to the list. Anna's Archive issued a statement on its blog regarding its Spotify heist, stating:"We backed up Spotify (metadata and music files). It’s distributed in bulk torrents (~300TB), grouped by popularity. This release includes the largest publicly available music metadata database with 256 million tracks and 186 million unique ISRCs."The site's statement continued:"It’s the world’s first “preservation archive” for music which is fully open (meaning it can easily be mirrored by anyone with enough disk space), with 86 million music files, representing around 99.6% of listens. Anna’s Archive normally focuses on text (e.g. books and papers). We explained in “The critical window of shadow libraries” that we do this because text has the highest information density."The archive later added:"But our mission (preserving humanity’s knowledge and culture) doesn’t distinguish among media types. Sometimes an opportunity comes along outside of text. This is such a case. A while ago, we discovered a way to scrape Spotify at scale. We saw a role for us here to build a music archive primarily aimed at preservation."Spotify releases statement on Anna's Archive heistSpotify has released a statement on the heist by Anna's Archive, confirming that it took place and that they are in the process of disabling the accounts and site used in the heist. The streaming giant also stated that they are implementing more safeguards after this event:"Spotify has identified and disabled the nefarious user accounts that engaged in unlawful scraping. We've implemented new safeguards for these types of anti-copyright attacks and are actively monitoring for suspicious behavior. Since day one, we have stood with the artist community against piracy, and we are actively working with our industry partners to protect creators and defend their rights.."Pop Tingz @PopTingzLINKHackers calling themselves Anna’s Archive claimed to have scraped Spotify’s library and archived metadata for 256 million tracks and 86 million audio files, totaling about 300 terabytes of data, which they plan to share via torrents. Spotify is currently investigating the unauthorized access.The heist by Anna's Archive on the streaming giant appears to be incomplete. As per Billboard, the file amount mentioned by the pirate group is less than the total files of the streaming giant. Anna's Archive has also mentioned in its blog post that the Spotify heist is a good start, bringing to light the seeming possibility of heists on other music streaming services in the future.