An activist group has claimed to have harvested millions of songs from Spotify and is preparing to publish them publicly.
Potential Boost for AI Training
Industry experts said the seeming data breach could aid artificial intelligence firms looking for material to train their models.
An entity called Anna’s Archive reported it had scraped 86 million music files from Spotify and 256 million rows of associated data such as artist and record names. The company, which hosts more than 100 million tracks, stated that the breach did not represent its entire inventory.
“We have located and deactivated the nefarious user accounts that were involved in unlawful scraping,” stated a company representative.
The Stockholm-based company, which has more than 700 million users worldwide, added that an inquiry into unauthorised access identified a third party scraped public metadata and used questionable tactics to bypass DRM [digital rights management].
Group's Stated Mission and Concerns
The streaming service does not believe the audio taken by Anna’s Archive has been released yet. Anna’s Archive, which is recognized for providing links to pirated books, said in a blog it wanted to create a ‘historical repository’ for music.
They asserted the audio files represented 99.6% of all music listened to by Spotify users and would be shared via ‘peer-to-peer networks’, a method of sharing large data files online.
“Of course the service doesn’t have all the music in the world, but it’s a great start,” said Anna’s Archive, which frames its purpose as “preserving humanity’s knowledge and culture”.
Model Development and Copyright Battleground
Ed Newton-Rex for defending artists’ copyright, remarked the leaked music would probably be used for developing AI models.
“Training on pirated data is unfortunately common in the AI industry, so this stolen music is highly likely to be used training AI models,” he said.
The group's website alludes to LibGen, a huge online repository of copyrighted books that has allegedly been used by Meta to develop its AI models.
The co-founder of an artificial intelligence company wrote on LinkedIn that members of the public could in theory “build their own private free equivalent of the service”. The executive said it could also allow technology firms to “train on modern music at a large volume”.
Intellectual property law has become a key issue between creatives, authors and creatives on one side and tech giants on the other.
Government Considerations and Reactions
Across Britain, creative professionals have raised concerns against a government proposal to let AI companies use copyright-protected work without consent unless the owner signals. Virtually every respondent to a government call for evidence on the proposal has supported artists’ apprehensions.
A government minister for science, innovation and technology 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 committed to make policy proposals on AI and copyright by next year.
