A digital rights organization has stated to have harvested millions of tracks from Spotify and is preparing to publish them publicly.
Potential Impetus for AI Training
Industry experts said the seeming leak could boost AI companies looking for data to develop their technology.
A group called Anna’s Archive reported it had scraped 86 million music files from the platform and 256 million entries of associated data such as artist and album names. Spotify, which hosts more than 100 million songs, confirmed that the breach did not constitute its entire catalog.
“We have located and deactivated the nefarious user accounts that were involved in illegal scraping,” stated a company spokesperson.
The Swedish service, which has more than 700 million subscribers worldwide, added that an investigation into unauthorized access identified a external actor collected public metadata and employed questionable methods to circumvent DRM protections.
Archive's Declared Mission and Concerns
The streaming service does not think the audio acquired by Anna’s Archive has been made public yet. Anna’s Archive, which is recognized for offering links to copyright-infringing books, said in a blog it wanted to create a ‘historical repository’ for music.
The group claimed the audio files accounted for 99.6% of all music listened to by its listeners 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 fantastic beginning,” commented Anna’s Archive, which frames its purpose as “preserving humanity’s information and heritage”.
Model Development and Copyright Battleground
A composer and campaigner for protecting artists’ rights, remarked the breached music would likely be utilized for developing artificial intelligence systems.
“Training on illegally sourced material is sadly common in the tech sector, so this stolen music is almost certain to be used training AI models,” he said.
The Anna’s Archive site makes references to a large online archive, a huge online archive of pirated books that has reportedly been leveraged by the parent company of Facebook to train its systems.
The co-founder of an AI startup wrote on LinkedIn that members of the public could in principle “build their own private free equivalent of the service”. The executive added it could also enable technology firms to “train on contemporary music at scale”.
Intellectual property law has emerged as a battleground between creatives, authors and content creators on one side and AI companies on the other.
Government Proposals and Reactions
In the UK, creative professionals have protested against a ministerial suggestion to let AI companies use copyright-protected work without permission unless the rights holder signals. Virtually every participant to a government consultation on the idea has supported artists’ apprehensions.
The secretary of state for technology, innovation and development told parliament this month there was “little consensus” on the issue, adding that ministers would “take the time to get this right”. The administration has pledged to make regulatory plans on AI and copyright by next year.
