An activist group has stated to have harvested millions of tracks from Spotify and is preparing to publish them publicly.
Potential Boost for Artificial Intelligence Training
Observers said the seeming data breach could boost artificial intelligence firms looking for material to train their models.
An entity known as Anna’s Archive said it had scraped 86 million audio tracks from the platform and 256 million entries of metadata such as artist and album names. The company, which carries more than 100 million tracks, confirmed that the leak did not represent its full catalog.
“We have identified and disabled the malicious user accounts that were involved in unlawful scraping,” stated a company representative.
The Swedish company, which has more than 700 million subscribers worldwide, further explained that an inquiry into unauthorized access identified a third party collected public metadata and employed illicit methods to circumvent DRM [digital rights management].
Group's Declared Mission and Worries
The streaming service does not think the music acquired by Anna’s Archive has been made public yet. Anna’s Archive, which is recognized for providing links to pirated books, said in a blog it wanted to create a ‘preservation archive’ for music.
The group asserted the music files represented 99.6% of all music streamed to by its listeners and would be shared via ‘peer-to-peer networks’, a means of sharing large digital files online.
“Of course Spotify doesn’t have all the music in the world, but it’s a fantastic start,” said Anna’s Archive, which describes its mission as “safeguarding humanity’s knowledge and culture”.
AI Training and Copyright Battleground
Ed Newton-Rex for defending artists’ copyright, said the leaked music would likely be used for developing AI models.
“Educating models on illegally sourced material is sadly common in the AI industry, so this stolen music is almost certain to be used training AI models,” he stated.
The group's website makes references to a large online archive, a huge online repository of copyrighted books that has reportedly been leveraged by Meta to develop its AI models.
A founder of an artificial intelligence company posted 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 enable technology firms to “train on modern music at scale”.
Intellectual property law has emerged as a key issue between creatives, authors and content creators on one side and tech giants on the other.
Government Proposals and Responses
In the UK, artists and writers have raised concerns against a government proposal to let AI companies use protected work without consent unless the rights holder opts out. Virtually every participant to a government consultation on the proposal has supported artists’ apprehensions.
A government minister for science, innovation and technology told parliament this month there was “no clear consensus” on the matter, adding that ministers would “use the time to get this right”. The government has committed to make regulatory plans on AI and copyright by next year.
