An activist organization has stated to have harvested millions of songs from Spotify and is preparing to publish them online.
Potential Impetus for Artificial Intelligence Training
Industry experts noted the seeming data breach could aid AI companies searching for data to develop their models.
An entity known as Anna’s Archive reported it had scraped 86 million audio tracks from Spotify and 256 million entries of metadata such as artist and album names. The company, which carries more than 100 million tracks, confirmed that the breach did not represent its entire inventory.
“We have located and deactivated the nefarious user accounts that engaged in illegal scraping,” said a company representative.
The Swedish service, which has more than 700 million users worldwide, added that an investigation into unauthorized access identified a external actor collected public metadata and used illicit methods to circumvent DRM [digital rights management].
Group'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 recognized for offering links to pirated books, said in a blog it wanted to create a ‘historical repository’ for music.
They asserted the music files accounted for 99.6% of all music streamed to by its listeners and would be shared via ‘peer-to-peer networks’, a method of sharing large digital files online.
“Of course Spotify doesn’t have all the music in the world, but it’s a fantastic beginning,” said Anna’s Archive, which describes its purpose as “preserving humanity’s information and heritage”.
AI Training and Copyright Debate
A composer and campaigner for protecting artists’ rights, said the leaked music would probably be utilized for training artificial intelligence systems.
“Educating models on pirated data is unfortunately widespread in the tech sector, so this stolen music is highly likely to be used training AI models,” he said.
The group's website makes references to a large online archive, a vast online repository of pirated books that has allegedly been leveraged by Meta to train its AI models.
The co-founder of an AI startup posted on the professional network that individuals of the public could in principle “create their own private free equivalent of Spotify”. He said it could also allow technology firms to “train on modern music at a large volume”.
Intellectual property law has emerged as a key issue between creatives, authors and creatives on one side and AI companies on the other.
Policy Proposals and Reactions
Across Britain, artists and writers have protested against a ministerial suggestion to allow AI companies utilize protected work without permission unless the rights holder opts out. Virtually every participant to a government call for evidence on the idea has supported artists’ concerns.
A government minister for science, research and development informed parliament this month there was “no clear consensus” on the matter, noting that ministers would “take the time to get this correct”. The administration has pledged to make regulatory plans on AI and copyright by next year.
