Advocacy Collective Asserts to Have Extracted Countless of Music Files from the Streaming Giant
A digital rights group has stated to have scraped a vast number of songs from Spotify and is preparing to publish them online.
Potential Boost for Artificial Intelligence Development
Industry experts noted the apparent data breach could boost artificial intelligence firms looking for data to develop their technology.
A group called Anna’s Archive said it had scraped 86 million audio tracks from the platform and 256 million entries of associated data such as artist and album names. Spotify, which hosts more than 100 million songs, confirmed that the leak did not represent its entire catalog.
“We have located and disabled the nefarious user accounts that were involved in unlawful scraping,” said a Spotify spokesperson.
The Swedish service, which has more than 700 million subscribers worldwide, added that an inquiry into unauthorised access found a external actor scraped public metadata and used questionable tactics to circumvent DRM [digital rights management].
Group's Stated Mission and Concerns
Spotify does not think the audio acquired 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 ‘preservation archive’ for music.
They asserted the audio files represented 99.6% of all music streamed to by its listeners and would be distributed via ‘peer-to-peer networks’, a method of sharing large digital files online.
“Of course Spotify doesn’t have all the music in the world, but it’s a fantastic start,” commented Anna’s Archive, which describes its purpose as “safeguarding humanity’s knowledge and heritage”.
AI Training and Copyright Battleground
A composer and campaigner for protecting artists’ copyright, remarked the leaked music would probably be used for training AI models.
“Educating models on pirated material is unfortunately widespread in the tech sector, so this stolen music is almost certain to be used training AI models,” he stated.
The group's website alludes to a large online archive, a huge online archive of pirated books that has reportedly been used by Meta to train its systems.
The co-founder of an artificial intelligence company wrote on the professional network that members of the public could in principle “build their own personal free version of Spotify”. The executive said it could also enable tech companies to “train on contemporary music at a large volume”.
Intellectual property law has become a key issue between creatives, authors and creatives on one side and AI companies on the other.
Government Considerations and Responses
In the UK, artists and writers have protested against a government suggestion to let AI companies use copyright-protected work without consent unless the rights holder opts out. Virtually every respondent to a government consultation on the proposal has supported artists’ concerns.
A government minister for science, research and development informed parliament this month there was “no clear consensus” on the matter, adding that ministers would “take the time to get this right”. The government has committed to make regulatory plans on AI and copyright by next year.
