A digital rights group has stated to have harvested millions of tracks from Spotify and is preparing to publish them publicly.
Potential Boost for AI Training
Industry experts said the apparent leak could boost AI companies searching for material to develop their technology.
An entity called Anna’s Archive said it had obtained 86 million audio tracks from Spotify and 256 million entries of associated data such as performer and record names. Spotify, which hosts more than 100 million songs, confirmed that the leak did not constitute its full catalog.
“We have located and disabled the nefarious user accounts that were involved in illegal scraping,” stated a company spokesperson.
The Stockholm-based company, which has more than 700 million users worldwide, added that an investigation into unauthorised access found a external actor scraped public metadata and employed questionable tactics to bypass DRM [digital rights management].
Group's Stated Mission and Concerns
Spotify does not think the music 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 ‘historical repository’ for music.
The group asserted the music files accounted for 99.6% of all music listened to by Spotify users and would be distributed via ‘torrents’, a means of exchanging large data files online.
“Of course Spotify doesn’t have all the music in the world, but it’s a great start,” said Anna’s Archive, which describes its mission as “safeguarding humanity’s knowledge and culture”.
Model Development and Intellectual Property Battleground
A composer and campaigner for protecting artists’ rights, remarked the breached music would probably be utilized for training artificial intelligence systems.
“Educating models on pirated material is unfortunately common in the AI industry, so this accessed music is highly likely to be used training AI models,” he said.
The Anna’s Archive site alludes to a large online archive, a vast online archive of pirated books that has reportedly been leveraged by the parent company of Facebook to develop its systems.
The co-founder of an artificial intelligence company wrote on the professional network that members of the public could in principle “create their own private free equivalent of Spotify”. The executive said it could also enable tech companies to “train on contemporary music at a large volume”.
Intellectual property law has become a battleground between artists, writers and content creators on one side and tech giants on the other.
Government Considerations and Responses
Across Britain, artists and writers have raised concerns against a government proposal to allow AI companies use protected work without permission unless the rights holder signals. Almost every participant to a government consultation on the proposal has supported artists’ apprehensions.
A government minister for science, innovation and development told parliament this month there was “little consensus” on the matter, adding that ministers would “use the time to get this correct”. The administration has committed to make policy proposals on AI and copyright by next year.
