An activist organization has stated to have harvested a vast number of songs from Spotify and is preparing to publish them online.
Potential Boost for AI Development
Industry experts said the seeming data breach could boost AI companies searching for data to train their technology.
An entity known as Anna’s Archive said it had scraped 86 million audio tracks from Spotify and 256 million entries of metadata such as performer and album names. Spotify, which carries more than 100 million songs, confirmed that the breach did not constitute its full catalog.
“We have located and disabled the nefarious user accounts that were involved in illegal scraping,” said a company spokesperson.
The Swedish company, which has more than 700 million users worldwide, added that an investigation into unauthorized access identified a external actor collected public metadata and employed questionable methods to bypass DRM [digital rights management].
Group's Stated Mission and Worries
The streaming service does not think the audio taken by Anna’s Archive has been made public yet. Anna’s Archive, which is known for providing links to pirated books, said in a blog it wanted to create a ‘preservation archive’ for music.
They asserted the music files accounted for 99.6% of all music listened to by Spotify users and would be distributed via ‘torrents’, a method of exchanging large digital files online.
“Of course the service doesn’t have all the music in the world, but it’s a great beginning,” said Anna’s Archive, which frames its purpose as “preserving humanity’s knowledge and heritage”.
Model Development and Intellectual Property Debate
A composer and campaigner for protecting artists’ copyright, said the leaked music would probably be used for developing AI models.
“Educating models on pirated data is sadly widespread in the AI industry, so this accessed music is highly likely to be used instructing AI models,” he said.
The Anna’s Archive site alludes to a large online archive, a vast online archive of copyrighted books that has allegedly been used by Meta to train its AI models.
A founder of an artificial intelligence company wrote on the professional network that members of the public could in principle “build their own private free equivalent of the service”. He said it could also allow technology firms to “train on contemporary music at scale”.
Intellectual property law has emerged as a key issue between creatives, writers and content creators on one side and AI companies on the other.
Policy Considerations and Responses
Across Britain, creative professionals have protested against a ministerial suggestion to allow AI companies utilize protected work without consent unless the owner signals. Virtually every respondent to a government consultation on the idea has backed artists’ concerns.
The secretary of state for technology, innovation and technology told parliament this month there was “little consensus” on the issue, noting that ministers would “use the time to get this right”. The government has pledged to make regulatory plans on AI and copyright by next year.
