A digital rights group has claimed to have harvested a vast number of songs from Spotify and is getting ready to publish them publicly.
Potential Boost for AI Training
Industry experts noted the seeming leak could aid artificial intelligence firms looking for material to develop their models.
An entity called Anna’s Archive said it had scraped 86 million audio tracks from the platform and 256 million rows of metadata such as artist and album names. The company, which hosts more than 100 million tracks, confirmed that the leak did not represent its entire catalog.
“We have identified and disabled the malicious user accounts that were involved in unlawful scraping,” stated a Spotify representative.
The Swedish company, which has more than 700 million subscribers worldwide, further explained that an investigation into unauthorised access identified a external actor scraped public metadata and employed illicit tactics to bypass DRM protections.
Archive's Declared Mission and Concerns
The streaming service does not believe the music acquired by Anna’s Archive has been made public yet. Anna’s Archive, which is known for providing links to copyright-infringing books, said in a blog it wanted to create a ‘historical repository’ for music.
The group claimed the music files represented 99.6% of all music listened to by its listeners and would be shared via ‘peer-to-peer networks’, a means of sharing large digital files online.
“Naturally the service doesn’t have all the music in the world, but it’s a fantastic start,” said Anna’s Archive, which describes its mission as “safeguarding humanity’s knowledge and culture”.
AI Training and Intellectual Property Battleground
A composer and campaigner for defending artists’ rights, said the breached music would probably be utilized for training AI models.
“Educating models on illegally sourced material is sadly common in the tech sector, so this accessed music is almost certain to end up training AI models,” he said.
The group's website makes references to LibGen, a huge online repository of pirated books that has reportedly been leveraged by the parent company of Facebook to train its AI models.
A founder of an AI startup posted on LinkedIn that members of the public could in principle “create their own private free version of the service”. He said it could also allow technology firms to “educate models on contemporary music at a large volume”.
Copyright has emerged as a battleground between creatives, authors and content creators on one side and tech giants on the other.
Policy Considerations and Reactions
Across Britain, artists and writers have protested against a government suggestion to allow AI companies utilize protected work without consent unless the owner opts out. Virtually every respondent to a government call for evidence on the idea has supported artists’ apprehensions.
The secretary of state for technology, research and technology informed parliament this month there was “little consensus” on the issue, noting that ministers would “take the time to get this correct”. The administration has pledged to make policy proposals on AI and copyright by next year.
