A digital rights organization has stated to have harvested a vast number of songs from Spotify and is getting ready to publish them online.
Potential Impetus for AI Development
Industry experts said the seeming data breach could boost AI companies looking for data to train their technology.
An entity known as Anna’s Archive reported it had scraped 86 million audio tracks from Spotify and 256 million rows of associated data such as artist and album names. The company, which hosts more than 100 million tracks, confirmed that the breach did not constitute its entire catalog.
“We have located and disabled the nefarious user accounts that were involved in unlawful scraping,” stated a company spokesperson.
The Stockholm-based service, which has more than 700 million users worldwide, further explained that an investigation into unauthorized access found a external actor collected public metadata and used questionable methods to bypass DRM [digital rights management].
Archive's Stated Goal and Concerns
The streaming service does not think the music acquired 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 ‘historical repository’ for music.
They claimed the audio files represented 99.6% of all music listened to by Spotify users and would be shared via ‘torrents’, a method of sharing large digital files online.
“Of course the service doesn’t have all the music in the world, but it’s a fantastic beginning,” said Anna’s Archive, which describes its mission as “safeguarding humanity’s knowledge and culture”.
AI Training and Intellectual Property Battleground
Ed Newton-Rex for defending artists’ rights, said the leaked music would likely be used for training artificial intelligence systems.
“Educating models on pirated data is sadly common in the tech sector, so this accessed music is almost certain to end up training AI models,” he said.
The group's website alludes to LibGen, a vast online repository of copyrighted books that has allegedly been used by Meta to train its systems.
The co-founder of an artificial intelligence company posted on LinkedIn that individuals of the public could in theory “create their own personal free equivalent of the service”. He added it could also allow tech companies to “educate models on modern music at scale”.
Intellectual property law has become a battleground between artists, writers and content creators on one side and tech giants on the other.
Government Considerations and Reactions
Across Britain, creative professionals have raised concerns against a government proposal to let AI companies use copyright-protected work without permission unless the owner signals. Virtually every respondent to a government call for evidence on the idea has supported artists’ apprehensions.
A government minister for technology, research and development informed parliament this month there was “no clear consensus” on the matter, noting that ministers would “take the time to get this correct”. The government has pledged to make policy proposals on AI and copyright by next year.
