A digital rights organization has claimed to have harvested millions of tracks from Spotify and is getting ready to release them publicly.
Potential Boost for AI Training
Industry experts said the seeming data breach could aid AI companies searching for material to train their models.
A group known as Anna’s Archive reported it had obtained 86 million music files from the platform and 256 million entries of metadata such as performer and record names. Spotify, which hosts more than 100 million tracks, stated that the leak did not constitute its full inventory.
“We have located and disabled the malicious user accounts that engaged in unlawful scraping,” said a Spotify spokesperson.
The Swedish service, which has more than 700 million users worldwide, added that an inquiry into unauthorised access identified a external actor scraped public metadata and used questionable tactics to circumvent DRM [digital rights management].
Archive's Declared Goal and Worries
Spotify does not believe the audio taken by Anna’s Archive has been released yet. Anna’s Archive, which is known for offering links to copyright-infringing books, said in a blog it wanted to create a ‘preservation archive’ for music.
They claimed the music files represented 99.6% of all music streamed to by Spotify users 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 start,” commented Anna’s Archive, which describes its purpose as “preserving humanity’s knowledge and heritage”.
Model Development and Intellectual Property Debate
Ed Newton-Rex for defending artists’ copyright, remarked the breached music would probably be used for training artificial intelligence systems.
“Training on pirated data is sadly widespread in the tech sector, so this accessed music is highly likely to end up instructing AI models,” he said.
The Anna’s Archive site alludes to LibGen, a vast online archive of copyrighted books that has allegedly been used by Meta to train its systems.
A founder of an artificial intelligence company wrote on the professional network that individuals of the public could in principle “build their own private free equivalent of the service”. He said it could also enable tech companies to “train on contemporary music at a large volume”.
Intellectual property law has become a battleground between artists, writers and content creators on one side and tech giants on the other.
Policy Considerations and Responses
Across Britain, creative professionals have protested against a government proposal 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’ concerns.
The secretary of state for technology, research and development told parliament this month there was “little consensus” on the issue, adding that ministers would “use the time to get this right”. The government has committed to make regulatory plans on AI and copyright by next year.
