A digital rights group has stated to have harvested millions of songs from Spotify and is preparing to release them publicly.
Possible Boost for AI Development
Observers noted the seeming leak could boost artificial intelligence firms looking for data to train their models.
An entity called Anna’s Archive said it had scraped 86 million music files from the platform and 256 million rows of associated data such as artist and record names. Spotify, which carries more than 100 million tracks, confirmed that the breach did not constitute its entire inventory.
“We have located and disabled the nefarious user accounts that engaged in unlawful scraping,” stated a Spotify representative.
The Swedish service, which has more than 700 million subscribers worldwide, further explained that an inquiry into unauthorised access found a third party collected public metadata and used questionable methods to circumvent DRM [digital rights management].
Archive's Declared Goal and Concerns
The streaming service does not believe the music taken by Anna’s Archive has been made public yet. Anna’s Archive, which is known for providing links to pirated books, wrote in a blog it wanted to create a ‘preservation archive’ for music.
They claimed the music files accounted for 99.6% of all music streamed to by Spotify users and would be distributed via ‘torrents’, a method of sharing large data files online.
“Naturally Spotify doesn’t have all the music in the world, but it’s a great beginning,” said Anna’s Archive, which describes its mission as “safeguarding humanity’s information and heritage”.
AI Training and Copyright Debate
A composer and campaigner for protecting artists’ rights, said the breached music would likely be utilized for developing artificial intelligence systems.
“Educating models on illegally sourced data is unfortunately widespread in the tech sector, so this accessed music is highly likely to be used training AI models,” he stated.
The group's website alludes to LibGen, a huge online archive of copyrighted books that has reportedly been leveraged by the parent company of Facebook to develop its AI models.
The co-founder of an AI startup wrote on the professional network that members of the public could in principle “build their own personal free version of Spotify”. The executive said it could also allow technology firms to “educate models on contemporary music at a large volume”.
Intellectual property law has become a key issue between creatives, authors and creatives on one side and AI companies on the other.
Government Proposals and Reactions
In the UK, creative professionals have protested against a government proposal to allow AI companies use copyright-protected work without consent unless the rights holder opts out. Virtually every respondent to a government call for evidence on the idea has backed artists’ concerns.
The secretary of state for technology, innovation and development told parliament this month there was “little consensus” on the issue, adding that ministers would “use the time to get this right”. The administration has pledged to make policy proposals on AI and copyright by next year.
