An activist organization has stated to have harvested millions of songs from Spotify and is preparing to publish them online.
Potential Impetus for AI Development
Observers said the apparent leak could aid artificial intelligence firms looking for material to develop their models.
An entity known as Anna’s Archive reported it had scraped 86 million audio tracks from Spotify and 256 million entries of metadata such as artist and record names. The company, which carries more than 100 million tracks, confirmed that the breach did not constitute its full inventory.
“We have identified and deactivated the nefarious user accounts that engaged in illegal scraping,” stated a Spotify spokesperson.
The Swedish service, which has more than 700 million subscribers worldwide, further explained that an investigation into unauthorized access found a third party collected public metadata and employed questionable methods to circumvent DRM [digital rights management].
Group's Stated Goal and Worries
The streaming service does not believe the audio acquired by Anna’s Archive has been released yet. Anna’s Archive, which is recognized for offering links to pirated books, wrote in a blog it wanted to create a ‘preservation archive’ for music.
They asserted the audio files accounted for 99.6% of all music listened to by its listeners and would be distributed via ‘peer-to-peer networks’, a means of exchanging large data files online.
“Naturally Spotify doesn’t have all the music in the world, but it’s a fantastic beginning,” said Anna’s Archive, which describes its mission as “preserving humanity’s information and culture”.
Model Development and Copyright Debate
Ed Newton-Rex for protecting artists’ rights, said the breached music would likely be utilized for developing artificial intelligence systems.
“Training on illegally sourced material is unfortunately widespread in the tech sector, so this accessed music is highly likely to be used training AI models,” he said.
The Anna’s Archive site alludes to a large online archive, a huge online repository of copyrighted books that has allegedly been leveraged by the parent company of Facebook to train its systems.
The co-founder of an artificial intelligence company posted on the professional network that members of the public could in principle “create their own private free equivalent of Spotify”. The executive added it could also allow technology firms to “train on contemporary music at scale”.
Intellectual property law has become a battleground between creatives, authors and content creators on one side and AI companies on the other.
Policy Considerations and Reactions
In the UK, creative professionals have protested against a government suggestion to let AI companies use copyright-protected work without permission unless the rights holder opts out. Virtually every participant to a government consultation on the proposal has supported artists’ apprehensions.
A government minister for science, innovation and technology told parliament this month there was “no clear consensus” on the matter, adding 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.
