An activist organization has stated to have scraped millions of tracks from the popular streaming service and is preparing to release them publicly.
Potential Boost for Artificial Intelligence Development
Industry experts noted the seeming leak could aid artificial intelligence firms looking for material to train their models.
A group called Anna’s Archive said it had obtained 86 million audio tracks from Spotify and 256 million rows of associated data such as performer and album names. The company, which carries more than 100 million songs, confirmed that the leak did not constitute its entire inventory.
“We have located and disabled the nefarious user accounts that were involved in illegal scraping,” stated a Spotify representative.
The Swedish service, which has more than 700 million subscribers worldwide, added that an inquiry into unauthorized access found a external actor scraped public metadata and employed illicit tactics to bypass DRM protections.
Archive's Stated Mission and Worries
The streaming service does not think the music acquired by Anna’s Archive has been made public yet. Anna’s Archive, which is known for offering links to copyright-infringing books, said in a blog it wanted to create a ‘preservation archive’ for music.
The group claimed the music files represented 99.6% of all music streamed to by its listeners and would be shared via ‘peer-to-peer networks’, a means of exchanging large digital files online.
“Of course the service doesn’t have all the music in the world, but it’s a great beginning,” commented Anna’s Archive, which describes its purpose as “safeguarding humanity’s information and culture”.
AI Training and Intellectual Property Debate
A composer and campaigner for protecting artists’ rights, said the breached music would likely be used for training artificial intelligence systems.
“Educating models on illegally sourced data is sadly common in the tech sector, so this stolen music is almost certain to end up training AI models,” he said.
The Anna’s Archive site makes references to a large online archive, a vast online archive of copyrighted books that has allegedly been leveraged by the parent company of Facebook to develop its AI models.
The co-founder of an AI startup posted on the professional network that members of the public could in principle “build their own personal free equivalent of the service”. He said it could also allow tech companies to “train on contemporary music at scale”.
Copyright has become a key issue between artists, writers and content creators on one side and AI companies on the other.
Government Proposals and Responses
Across Britain, artists and writers have protested against a government suggestion to allow AI companies use copyright-protected work without consent unless the rights holder opts out. Virtually every participant to a government call for evidence on the proposal has supported artists’ concerns.
A government minister for technology, research and technology told parliament this month there was “little consensus” on the matter, noting 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.
