A digital rights group has claimed to have harvested a vast number of tracks from Spotify and is preparing to release them online.
Possible Boost for Artificial Intelligence Development
Observers said the seeming leak could boost AI companies searching for data to train their models.
A group called Anna’s Archive reported it had obtained 86 million music files from the platform and 256 million rows of metadata such as artist and album names. Spotify, which carries more than 100 million songs, stated that the breach did not represent its full inventory.
“We have located and disabled the malicious user accounts that were involved in illegal scraping,” said a Spotify representative.
The Stockholm-based company, which has more than 700 million subscribers worldwide, added that an investigation into unauthorized access found a external actor scraped public metadata and used questionable methods to circumvent DRM protections.
Archive's Stated Mission and Worries
Spotify does not believe the audio taken by Anna’s Archive has been released yet. Anna’s Archive, which is recognized for offering links to pirated books, wrote in a blog it wanted to create a ‘preservation archive’ for music.
They asserted the music files accounted for 99.6% of all music streamed to by Spotify users and would be distributed via ‘torrents’, a means of exchanging large data files online.
“Of course the service doesn’t have all the music in the world, but it’s a fantastic beginning,” said Anna’s Archive, which describes its purpose as “preserving humanity’s information and culture”.
AI Training and Copyright Debate
A composer and campaigner for protecting artists’ copyright, said the leaked music would likely be utilized for training artificial intelligence systems.
“Educating models on illegally sourced data is unfortunately widespread in the AI industry, so this accessed music is highly likely to be used training AI models,” he stated.
The group's website alludes to a large online archive, a huge online repository of copyrighted books that has reportedly been used by the parent company of Facebook to train its AI models.
The co-founder of an AI startup wrote on LinkedIn that individuals of the public could in principle “create their own private free version of Spotify”. The executive added it could also allow tech companies to “train on modern music at scale”.
Copyright has emerged as a key issue between artists, writers and content creators on one side and AI companies on the other.
Policy Proposals and Reactions
In the UK, artists and writers have raised concerns against a ministerial proposal to allow AI companies use copyright-protected work without permission unless the rights holder signals. Virtually every participant to a government consultation on the proposal has supported artists’ concerns.
A government minister for science, research and technology informed parliament this month there was “no clear consensus” on the issue, adding that ministers would “take the time to get this correct”. The government has committed to make regulatory plans on AI and copyright by next year.
