An activist organization has stated to have harvested millions of songs from the popular streaming service and is getting ready to publish them online.
Possible Boost for Artificial Intelligence Development
Observers said the apparent leak could aid artificial intelligence firms searching for material to develop their models.
A group called Anna’s Archive said it had scraped 86 million audio tracks from Spotify and 256 million rows of associated data such as performer and album names. The company, which carries more than 100 million tracks, stated that the breach did not constitute its full inventory.
“We have located and disabled the nefarious user accounts that engaged in illegal scraping,” said a company spokesperson.
The Stockholm-based service, which has more than 700 million users worldwide, added that an investigation into unauthorized access identified a third party collected public metadata and employed illicit methods to circumvent DRM [digital rights management].
Group's Stated Mission and Worries
The streaming service does not think the music acquired by Anna’s Archive has been released yet. Anna’s Archive, which is known for offering 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 sharing 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 purpose as “preserving humanity’s knowledge and culture”.
AI Training and Intellectual Property Battleground
Ed Newton-Rex for protecting artists’ copyright, said the leaked music would likely be used for training AI models.
“Educating models on pirated data is sadly widespread in the tech sector, so this stolen music is almost certain to end up training AI models,” he said.
The Anna’s Archive site alludes to LibGen, a huge online repository of pirated books that has allegedly been used by the parent company of Facebook to train its systems.
The co-founder of an artificial intelligence company posted on LinkedIn that members of the public could in theory “create their own personal free equivalent of the service”. He said it could also allow tech companies to “train on modern music at a large volume”.
Copyright has become a battleground between artists, writers and creatives on one side and AI companies on the other.
Government Proposals and Responses
In the UK, artists and writers have raised concerns against a ministerial proposal to allow AI companies utilize copyright-protected work without consent unless the rights holder opts out. Virtually every respondent to a government call for evidence on the proposal has backed artists’ concerns.
A government minister for technology, innovation and technology informed parliament this month there was “little consensus” on the issue, adding that ministers would “take the time to get this correct”. The administration has pledged to make policy proposals on AI and copyright by March 2025.
