A digital rights organization has claimed to have harvested millions of tracks from Spotify and is preparing to release them online.
Potential Boost for Artificial Intelligence Training
Industry experts said the seeming leak could aid AI companies searching for data to train their models.
An entity known as Anna’s Archive said it had obtained 86 million audio tracks from Spotify and 256 million rows of metadata such as performer and album names. The company, which carries more than 100 million songs, stated that the breach did not represent its full catalog.
“We have identified and disabled the nefarious user accounts that engaged in illegal scraping,” stated a Spotify spokesperson.
The Stockholm-based service, which has more than 700 million users worldwide, further explained that an inquiry into unauthorized access identified a external actor collected public metadata and used illicit methods to bypass DRM [digital rights management].
Archive's Stated Mission and Worries
The streaming service does not think 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 ‘historical repository’ for music.
They asserted the music files represented 99.6% of all music streamed to by its listeners and would be shared via ‘torrents’, a means of exchanging large digital files online.
“Naturally Spotify doesn’t have all the music in the world, but it’s a great beginning,” said Anna’s Archive, which frames its purpose as “preserving humanity’s information and culture”.
Model Development and Copyright Battleground
A composer and campaigner for protecting artists’ copyright, remarked the breached music would probably be used for training artificial intelligence systems.
“Educating models on pirated data is unfortunately widespread in the AI industry, so this stolen music is almost certain to end up training AI models,” he said.
The Anna’s Archive site makes references to LibGen, a huge online repository of pirated books that has allegedly been leveraged by the parent company of Facebook to develop its AI models.
The co-founder of an AI startup posted on LinkedIn that members of the public could in theory “create their own personal free equivalent of Spotify”. He added it could also enable technology firms to “train on contemporary music at a large volume”.
Intellectual property law has become a battleground between artists, writers and creatives on one side and tech giants on the other.
Policy Considerations and Responses
Across Britain, artists and writers have raised concerns against a ministerial suggestion to let AI companies use copyright-protected work without permission unless the owner opts out. Virtually every respondent to a government consultation on the proposal has supported artists’ apprehensions.
A government minister for science, research and development told parliament this month there was “no clear consensus” on the issue, adding that ministers would “use the time to get this correct”. The government has pledged to make regulatory plans on AI and copyright by next year.
