A digital rights group has stated to have harvested a vast number of tracks from Spotify and is getting ready to publish them publicly.
Potential Boost for AI Training
Industry experts noted the seeming leak could aid AI companies searching for material to train their technology.
An entity known as Anna’s Archive said it had scraped 86 million music files from the platform and 256 million entries of associated data such as performer and record names. The company, which carries more than 100 million songs, confirmed that the breach did not represent its entire inventory.
“We have located and disabled the nefarious user accounts that engaged in illegal scraping,” said a Spotify spokesperson.
The Swedish company, which has more than 700 million subscribers worldwide, further explained that an investigation into unauthorised access found a external actor collected public metadata and employed questionable methods to circumvent DRM [digital rights management].
Archive's Stated Goal and Worries
Spotify does not believe the music 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 ‘historical repository’ for music.
They claimed the audio files accounted for 99.6% of all music listened to by Spotify users and would be shared via ‘torrents’, a method of sharing large digital files online.
“Naturally Spotify doesn’t have all the music in the world, but it’s a great start,” said Anna’s Archive, which describes its purpose as “safeguarding humanity’s information and heritage”.
Model Development and Intellectual Property Battleground
A composer and campaigner for protecting artists’ rights, remarked the breached music would probably be used for training artificial intelligence systems.
“Educating models on pirated material is unfortunately common in the AI industry, so this stolen music is highly likely to be used training AI models,” he said.
The Anna’s Archive site alludes to LibGen, a huge online archive of copyrighted books that has reportedly been leveraged by Meta to train its systems.
A founder of an artificial intelligence company wrote on the professional network that members of the public could in theory “build their own private free version of the service”. He said it could also allow tech companies to “educate models on modern music at a large volume”.
Intellectual property law has become a battleground between artists, authors and creatives on one side and AI companies on the other.
Policy Considerations and Reactions
Across Britain, artists and writers have protested against a government proposal to let AI companies use protected work without consent unless the rights holder signals. Virtually every participant to a government call for evidence on the idea has supported artists’ apprehensions.
The secretary of state for science, research and development informed 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.
