An activist group has claimed to have harvested a vast number of songs from the popular streaming service and is getting ready to publish them publicly.
Potential Boost for AI Training
Industry experts noted the apparent data breach could boost AI companies searching for material to develop their technology.
An entity called Anna’s Archive said it had obtained 86 million music files from the platform and 256 million entries of associated data such as performer and record names. Spotify, which carries more than 100 million songs, confirmed that the leak did not represent its full inventory.
“We have located and deactivated the nefarious user accounts that were involved in unlawful scraping,” said a company spokesperson.
The Swedish company, which has more than 700 million users worldwide, further explained that an inquiry into unauthorised access found a external actor scraped public metadata and employed illicit methods to bypass DRM protections.
Archive's Declared Goal and Worries
The streaming service does not believe the audio taken by Anna’s Archive has been released 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 asserted the music files accounted for 99.6% of all music listened to by Spotify users and would be shared via ‘peer-to-peer networks’, a means of sharing large data files online.
“Of course the service doesn’t have all the music in the world, but it’s a fantastic start,” commented Anna’s Archive, which frames its mission as “preserving humanity’s information and culture”.
AI Training and Intellectual Property Debate
Ed Newton-Rex for protecting artists’ copyright, remarked the leaked music would likely be used for training artificial intelligence systems.
“Training on pirated material is unfortunately common in the tech sector, so this accessed music is highly likely to end up training 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 allegedly been used by the parent company of Facebook to develop its systems.
The co-founder of an AI startup posted on the professional network that members of the public could in theory “create their own private free version of the service”. The executive added it could also enable technology firms to “educate models on contemporary music at scale”.
Copyright has emerged as a battleground between artists, writers and creatives on one side and tech giants on the other.
Policy Considerations and Reactions
In the UK, creative professionals have raised concerns against a government proposal to let AI companies use copyright-protected work without consent unless the rights holder opts out. Virtually every respondent to a government consultation on the proposal has supported artists’ apprehensions.
The secretary of state for technology, innovation and technology informed parliament this month there was “little consensus” on the issue, noting that ministers would “take the time to get this right”. The government has pledged to make regulatory plans on AI and copyright by next year.
