An activist organization has stated to have scraped millions of songs from Spotify and is preparing to publish them online.
Possible Boost for Artificial Intelligence Development
Industry experts said the apparent leak could boost artificial intelligence firms searching for data to train their technology.
A group called Anna’s Archive said it had scraped 86 million music files from Spotify and 256 million rows of metadata such as artist and record names. The company, which carries more than 100 million tracks, stated that the breach did not constitute its entire catalog.
“We have located and disabled the nefarious user accounts that were involved in unlawful scraping,” said a Spotify representative.
The Stockholm-based service, which has more than 700 million subscribers worldwide, added that an inquiry into unauthorized access found a third party collected public metadata and employed questionable methods to bypass DRM protections.
Archive's Declared Goal and Worries
Spotify does not believe the music acquired by Anna’s Archive has been made public yet. Anna’s Archive, which is recognized for providing links to pirated books, said in a blog it wanted to create a ‘preservation archive’ for music.
They claimed the audio files accounted for 99.6% of all music streamed to by Spotify users and would be shared via ‘peer-to-peer networks’, a means of sharing large digital files online.
“Of course the service doesn’t have all the music in the world, but it’s a great beginning,” said Anna’s Archive, which frames its purpose as “safeguarding humanity’s knowledge and heritage”.
Model Development and Copyright Debate
A composer and campaigner for defending artists’ rights, said the breached music would likely be utilized for training AI models.
“Training on illegally sourced material is sadly common in the tech sector, so this stolen music is almost certain to end up instructing AI models,” he stated.
The group's website alludes to LibGen, a huge online archive of copyrighted books that has allegedly 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 principle “build their own personal free equivalent of Spotify”. He added it could also allow tech companies to “educate models on contemporary music at a large volume”.
Copyright has become a key issue between creatives, writers and creatives on one side and AI companies on the other.
Government Proposals and Reactions
Across Britain, creative professionals have protested against a ministerial proposal to let AI companies use copyright-protected work without permission unless the rights holder opts out. Virtually every participant to a government consultation on the idea has supported artists’ concerns.
A government minister for technology, innovation 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 government has committed to make regulatory plans on AI and copyright by next year.
