A digital rights organization has claimed to have harvested millions of songs from Spotify and is preparing to publish them online.
Possible Impetus for Artificial Intelligence Development
Industry experts noted the seeming data breach could boost artificial intelligence firms looking for material to train their models.
A group called Anna’s Archive said it had scraped 86 million audio tracks from the platform and 256 million rows of associated data such as artist and record names. Spotify, which carries more than 100 million songs, stated that the leak did not constitute its full catalog.
“We have located and disabled the malicious user accounts that engaged in unlawful scraping,” said a Spotify spokesperson.
The Swedish company, which has more than 700 million subscribers worldwide, added that an inquiry into unauthorised access identified a third party scraped public metadata and used questionable methods to bypass DRM protections.
Archive's Stated Goal and Concerns
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 offering links to pirated books, said in a blog it wanted to create a ‘preservation archive’ for music.
They claimed the audio files represented 99.6% of all music streamed to by Spotify users and would be distributed via ‘torrents’, a method of exchanging large data files online.
“Naturally the service doesn’t have all the music in the world, but it’s a fantastic beginning,” said Anna’s Archive, which describes its mission as “preserving humanity’s knowledge and heritage”.
AI Training and Intellectual Property Debate
Ed Newton-Rex for defending artists’ copyright, remarked the leaked music would probably be utilized for training AI models.
“Training on illegally sourced material is unfortunately common in the AI industry, so this stolen music is almost certain to end up training AI models,” he said.
The group's website makes references to a large online archive, a huge online repository of copyrighted books that has allegedly been leveraged by Meta to train its systems.
The co-founder of an AI startup wrote on the professional network that individuals of the public could in theory “create their own private free equivalent of Spotify”. 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, authors and creatives on one side and tech giants on the other.
Government Considerations and Responses
In the UK, creative professionals have raised concerns against a government suggestion to allow AI companies use copyright-protected work without permission unless the owner opts out. Almost every respondent to a government consultation on the idea has backed artists’ apprehensions.
The secretary of state for science, innovation and development informed parliament this month there was “no clear consensus” on the matter, noting that ministers would “take the time to get this right”. The government has pledged to make regulatory plans on AI and copyright by next year.
