A digital rights group has stated to have scraped a vast number of tracks from Spotify and is preparing to publish them publicly.
Potential Impetus for AI Development
Observers noted the apparent leak could boost artificial intelligence firms searching for data to develop their models.
An entity called Anna’s Archive reported it had obtained 86 million music files from the platform and 256 million rows of associated data such as artist and album names. The company, which hosts more than 100 million tracks, stated that the breach did not constitute its full catalog.
“We have identified and disabled the malicious user accounts that were involved in illegal scraping,” said a Spotify spokesperson.
The Swedish company, which has more than 700 million users worldwide, added that an investigation into unauthorised access identified a third party collected public metadata and employed questionable methods to bypass DRM [digital rights management].
Archive's Declared Mission and Concerns
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 offering links to pirated books, said in a blog it wanted to create a ‘preservation archive’ for music.
The group claimed the audio files represented 99.6% of all music listened to by Spotify users and would be distributed via ‘peer-to-peer networks’, a means of sharing large data files online.
“Naturally Spotify doesn’t have all the music in the world, but it’s a great beginning,” said Anna’s Archive, which describes its mission as “safeguarding humanity’s knowledge and heritage”.
AI Training and Intellectual Property Debate
A composer and campaigner for defending artists’ copyright, remarked the leaked music would likely be utilized for developing artificial intelligence systems.
“Educating models on pirated data is unfortunately widespread in the AI industry, so this stolen music is almost certain to end up training AI models,” he stated.
The Anna’s Archive site alludes to a large online archive, a huge online repository of copyrighted books that has allegedly been used by the parent company of Facebook to train its AI models.
The co-founder of an AI startup posted on LinkedIn that members of the public could in principle “create their own private free equivalent of Spotify”. The executive added it could also enable tech companies to “train on modern music at scale”.
Intellectual property law has become a battleground between creatives, authors and creatives on one side and tech giants on the other.
Policy Proposals and Reactions
Across Britain, artists and writers have protested against a government proposal to allow AI companies utilize protected work without consent unless the owner opts out. Virtually every participant to a government consultation on the idea has backed artists’ concerns.
The secretary of state for technology, research and technology told parliament this month there was “little consensus” on the matter, noting that ministers would “take the time to get this correct”. The government has pledged to make regulatory plans on AI and copyright by next year.
