A digital rights group has claimed to have harvested millions of tracks from Spotify and is getting ready to publish them publicly.
Possible Impetus for AI Development
Industry experts noted the apparent leak could boost artificial intelligence firms searching for data to train their technology.
An entity called Anna’s Archive said it had scraped 86 million audio tracks from Spotify and 256 million rows of metadata such as performer and record names. The company, which carries more than 100 million tracks, confirmed that the breach did not represent its entire inventory.
“We have located and disabled the malicious user accounts that engaged in unlawful scraping,” said a company spokesperson.
The Stockholm-based company, which has more than 700 million users worldwide, added that an investigation into unauthorised access found a external actor collected public metadata and employed questionable tactics to circumvent DRM protections.
Archive's Declared Mission and Worries
Spotify does not think the music taken by Anna’s Archive has been made public yet. Anna’s Archive, which is recognized for providing links to pirated books, wrote in a blog it wanted to create a ‘preservation archive’ for music.
The group claimed the music files accounted for 99.6% of all music streamed to by its listeners and would be distributed via ‘peer-to-peer networks’, a means of exchanging large data files online.
“Of course Spotify doesn’t have all the music in the world, but it’s a great beginning,” said Anna’s Archive, which frames its mission as “safeguarding humanity’s information and heritage”.
Model Development and Copyright Debate
A composer and campaigner for defending artists’ copyright, remarked the breached music would probably be utilized for training artificial intelligence systems.
“Educating models on illegally sourced material is sadly widespread in the AI industry, so this stolen music is almost certain to be used instructing AI models,” he said.
The Anna’s Archive site makes references to a large online archive, a huge online archive of copyrighted books that has reportedly been used by the parent company of Facebook to train its systems.
A founder of an AI startup posted on LinkedIn that members of the public could in theory “create their own private free equivalent of Spotify”. The executive said it could also enable tech companies to “educate models on contemporary music at scale”.
Intellectual property law has become a battleground between artists, writers and content creators on one side and tech giants on the other.
Government Considerations and Responses
Across Britain, artists and writers have protested against a ministerial suggestion to allow AI companies use protected work without permission unless the owner signals. Almost every respondent to a government call for evidence on the idea has backed artists’ apprehensions.
The secretary of state for science, research and technology told parliament this month there was “little consensus” on the issue, adding that ministers would “use the time to get this correct”. The administration has pledged to make policy proposals on AI and copyright by next year.
