An activist group has claimed to have harvested a vast number of tracks from the popular streaming service and is preparing to release them online.
Possible Impetus for Artificial Intelligence Development
Industry experts said the seeming leak could boost artificial intelligence firms looking for material to train their models.
A group called Anna’s Archive said it had scraped 86 million audio tracks from Spotify and 256 million rows of metadata such as artist and record names. Spotify, which hosts more than 100 million songs, stated that the leak did not represent its entire catalog.
“We have located and deactivated the malicious user accounts that engaged in illegal scraping,” said a Spotify spokesperson.
The Stockholm-based service, which has more than 700 million subscribers worldwide, added that an inquiry into unauthorised access identified a external actor collected public metadata and employed illicit methods to circumvent DRM protections.
Group's Stated Mission and Worries
Spotify does not think the music taken 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 ‘preservation archive’ for music.
They claimed the music files represented 99.6% of all music streamed to by Spotify users and would be shared via ‘peer-to-peer networks’, a method of exchanging 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 describes its mission as “preserving humanity’s knowledge and heritage”.
Model Development and Intellectual Property Debate
A composer and campaigner for protecting artists’ rights, said the breached music would likely be utilized for training AI models.
“Educating models on illegally sourced data is unfortunately common in the AI industry, so this stolen music is almost certain to end up training AI models,” he stated.
The Anna’s Archive site makes references to LibGen, a huge online archive of pirated books that has allegedly been leveraged by the parent company of Facebook to train its AI models.
A founder of an AI startup posted on the professional network that members of the public could in principle “build their own private free equivalent of Spotify”. The executive added it could also allow technology firms to “educate models on contemporary music at scale”.
Intellectual property law has emerged as a battleground between creatives, writers and creatives on one side and tech giants on the other.
Policy Proposals and Reactions
In the UK, artists and writers have raised concerns against a ministerial proposal to let AI companies use protected work without permission unless the owner opts out. Virtually every participant to a government call for evidence on the idea has supported artists’ apprehensions.
The secretary of state for science, innovation and technology told parliament this month there was “little consensus” on the issue, adding that ministers would “take the time to get this correct”. The administration has pledged to make policy proposals on AI and copyright by next year.
