An activist organization has claimed to have harvested millions of songs from Spotify and is preparing to publish them online.
Potential Impetus for AI Training
Industry experts noted the seeming leak could aid artificial intelligence firms looking for data to develop their technology.
An entity called Anna’s Archive said it had scraped 86 million audio tracks from the platform and 256 million entries of metadata such as artist and record names. Spotify, which hosts more than 100 million tracks, confirmed that the breach did not represent its entire catalog.
“We have located and deactivated the malicious user accounts that engaged in illegal scraping,” said a Spotify representative.
The Swedish company, which has more than 700 million subscribers worldwide, further explained that an investigation into unauthorized access identified a external actor scraped public metadata and employed illicit methods to bypass DRM [digital rights management].
Group's Declared Goal and Concerns
The streaming service does not think the music 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 ‘historical repository’ for music.
They 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 method of exchanging large data files online.
“Naturally Spotify doesn’t have all the music in the world, but it’s a fantastic beginning,” commented 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’ copyright, remarked the breached music would likely be utilized for training artificial intelligence systems.
“Training on pirated material is sadly 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 LibGen, a huge online repository of copyrighted books that has reportedly been used by the parent company of Facebook to train its AI models.
The co-founder of an artificial intelligence company posted on the professional network that individuals of the public could in theory “build their own private free version of Spotify”. The executive added it could also enable technology firms to “educate models on modern music at scale”.
Copyright has emerged as a battleground between artists, writers and content creators on one side and AI companies on the other.
Policy Proposals and Responses
Across Britain, creative professionals have protested against a ministerial proposal to allow AI companies utilize copyright-protected work without consent unless the rights holder opts out. Almost every respondent to a government consultation on the proposal has supported artists’ concerns.
A government minister for science, research and technology informed parliament this month there was “no clear consensus” on the matter, adding that ministers would “use the time to get this right”. The government has pledged to make policy proposals on AI and copyright by next year.
