A digital rights organization has claimed to have scraped a vast number of songs from Spotify and is getting ready to release them online.
Possible Boost for Artificial Intelligence Development
Industry experts said the seeming data breach could boost AI companies looking for material to develop their models.
A group known as Anna’s Archive said it had scraped 86 million audio tracks from Spotify and 256 million entries of metadata such as artist and record names. Spotify, which carries more than 100 million tracks, stated that the breach did not represent its entire catalog.
“We have located and deactivated the malicious user accounts that were involved in unlawful scraping,” said a Spotify spokesperson.
The Swedish company, which has more than 700 million subscribers worldwide, added that an inquiry into unauthorised access found a third party collected public metadata and used illicit methods to bypass DRM protections.
Group's Stated Goal and Concerns
The streaming service does not believe the audio acquired by Anna’s Archive has been released yet. Anna’s Archive, which is known for offering links to pirated books, said in a blog it wanted to create a ‘historical repository’ for music.
The group asserted the music files represented 99.6% of all music streamed to by Spotify users and would be distributed via ‘peer-to-peer networks’, a method of sharing large digital files online.
“Naturally Spotify doesn’t have all the music in the world, but it’s a great start,” commented Anna’s Archive, which describes its mission as “preserving humanity’s information and culture”.
AI Training and Copyright Battleground
A composer and campaigner for protecting artists’ rights, remarked the leaked music would probably be used for training artificial intelligence systems.
“Training on pirated data is unfortunately common in the AI industry, so this accessed music is highly likely to end up instructing AI models,” he said.
The Anna’s Archive site makes references to LibGen, a vast online repository of copyrighted books that has reportedly been used by Meta to train its AI models.
The co-founder of an AI startup posted on LinkedIn that members of the public could in theory “build their own private free equivalent of Spotify”. The executive added it could also allow technology firms to “train on modern music at a large volume”.
Copyright has emerged as a battleground between artists, writers and creatives on one side and tech giants on the other.
Government Proposals and Responses
In the UK, artists and writers have raised concerns against a government proposal to allow AI companies use protected work without consent unless the owner opts out. Virtually every respondent to a government consultation on the idea has supported artists’ apprehensions.
A government minister for science, research and development told parliament this month there was “no clear consensus” on the issue, noting that ministers would “use the time to get this right”. The administration has committed to make policy proposals on AI and copyright by next year.
