A digital rights organization has stated to have harvested millions of songs from the popular streaming service and is getting ready to publish them publicly.
Potential Boost for Artificial Intelligence Development
Industry experts said the seeming leak could aid AI companies searching for material to develop their technology.
A group called Anna’s Archive reported it had scraped 86 million audio tracks from the platform and 256 million entries of associated data such as artist and record names. Spotify, which carries more than 100 million songs, stated that the leak did not represent its full catalog.
“We have identified and disabled the malicious user accounts that were involved in unlawful scraping,” stated a company representative.
The Swedish service, which has more than 700 million users worldwide, added that an inquiry into unauthorised access identified a third party scraped public metadata and employed illicit tactics to bypass DRM [digital rights management].
Group's Declared Mission and Concerns
The streaming service does not think the music taken by Anna’s Archive has been released 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 asserted the music files accounted for 99.6% of all music listened to by its listeners and would be shared via ‘torrents’, a means of sharing large digital files online.
“Naturally the service doesn’t have all the music in the world, but it’s a fantastic start,” said Anna’s Archive, which frames its purpose as “safeguarding humanity’s information and culture”.
Model Development and Copyright Debate
A composer and campaigner for defending artists’ rights, remarked the breached music would likely be used for training AI models.
“Educating models on pirated material is unfortunately widespread in the AI industry, so this accessed music is almost certain to end up training AI models,” he stated.
The Anna’s Archive site makes references to a large online archive, a huge online archive of pirated books that has allegedly been used by the parent company of Facebook to develop its AI models.
A founder of an AI startup posted on the professional network that individuals of the public could in theory “build their own personal free version of Spotify”. He added it could also allow tech companies to “train on modern music at scale”.
Copyright has become a key issue between artists, authors and creatives on one side and AI companies on the other.
Government Considerations and Reactions
Across Britain, creative professionals have protested against a government proposal to allow AI companies use protected work without permission unless the rights holder opts out. Almost every respondent to a government consultation on the proposal has backed artists’ apprehensions.
A government minister for technology, research and development told parliament this month there was “little consensus” on the matter, noting that ministers would “use the time to get this correct”. The government has committed to make policy proposals on AI and copyright by next year.
