An activist group has stated to have harvested a vast number of tracks from Spotify and is preparing to publish them online.
Potential Boost for Artificial Intelligence Training
Industry experts noted the apparent leak could aid artificial intelligence firms looking for data to train their models.
An entity called Anna’s Archive reported it had scraped 86 million music files from the platform and 256 million entries of associated data such as performer and album names. The company, which hosts more than 100 million songs, confirmed that the leak did not constitute its full inventory.
“We have located and disabled the nefarious user accounts that were involved in unlawful scraping,” stated a Spotify representative.
The Stockholm-based 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 methods to circumvent DRM protections.
Archive's Stated Mission and Worries
The streaming service does not think the music taken by Anna’s Archive has been made public yet. Anna’s Archive, which is known for providing links to copyright-infringing books, said in a blog it wanted to create a ‘historical repository’ for music.
They claimed the music files represented 99.6% of all music streamed to by its listeners and would be distributed via ‘torrents’, a means of exchanging large data files online.
“Of course the service doesn’t have all the music in the world, but it’s a great start,” said Anna’s Archive, which describes its mission as “preserving humanity’s knowledge and culture”.
AI Training and Intellectual Property Battleground
Ed Newton-Rex for defending artists’ rights, remarked the breached music would probably be used for training artificial intelligence systems.
“Educating models on pirated data is unfortunately common in the AI industry, so this stolen music is almost certain to be used training AI models,” he said.
The group's website alludes to a large online archive, a vast online archive of copyrighted books that has allegedly been used by Meta to train its AI models.
The co-founder of an AI startup wrote on the professional network that members of the public could in principle “build their own personal free equivalent of the service”. He added it could also enable tech companies to “educate models on modern music at a large volume”.
Copyright has emerged as a key issue between creatives, authors and content creators on one side and AI companies on the other.
Policy Proposals and Reactions
In the UK, artists and writers have raised concerns against a government suggestion to allow AI companies use copyright-protected work without permission unless the rights holder opts out. Virtually every respondent to a government consultation on the idea has supported artists’ apprehensions.
The secretary of state for technology, research and development informed parliament this month there was “little consensus” on the issue, noting that ministers would “use the time to get this right”. The administration has pledged to make policy proposals on AI and copyright by next year.
