A digital rights group has claimed to have harvested a vast number of songs from Spotify and is preparing to release them publicly.
Potential Boost for Artificial Intelligence Development
Observers noted the seeming data breach could boost AI companies searching for data to develop their models.
An entity called Anna’s Archive said it had scraped 86 million music files from the platform and 256 million rows of associated data such as performer and record names. Spotify, which hosts more than 100 million songs, stated that the breach did not represent its full catalog.
“We have identified and disabled the nefarious user accounts that were involved in illegal scraping,” stated a Spotify representative.
The Stockholm-based service, which has more than 700 million subscribers worldwide, added that an inquiry into unauthorised access found a third party scraped public metadata and employed illicit methods to bypass DRM [digital rights management].
Archive's Stated Goal and Concerns
The streaming service does not believe the music acquired by Anna’s Archive has been made public yet. Anna’s Archive, which is recognized for offering links to pirated books, wrote in a blog it wanted to create a ‘preservation archive’ for music.
The group claimed the audio files represented 99.6% of all music listened to by Spotify users and would be distributed via ‘torrents’, a method of sharing large data files online.
“Naturally the service doesn’t have all the music in the world, but it’s a great beginning,” commented Anna’s Archive, which frames its mission as “safeguarding humanity’s knowledge and heritage”.
Model Development and Copyright Debate
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 unfortunately common in the AI industry, so this accessed music is highly likely to be used instructing AI models,” he said.
The group's website makes references to a large online archive, a huge online archive of copyrighted books that has allegedly been used by the parent company of Facebook to train its systems.
A founder of an AI startup posted on LinkedIn that members of the public could in principle “build their own private free version of Spotify”. He said it could also enable tech companies to “train on modern music at scale”.
Copyright has become a key issue between artists, writers and creatives on one side and tech giants on the other.
Government Considerations and Reactions
In the UK, creative professionals have raised concerns against a government suggestion to allow AI companies utilize protected work without consent unless the rights holder signals. Virtually every respondent to a government consultation on the proposal has supported artists’ concerns.
A government minister for science, innovation and development informed parliament this month there was “little consensus” on the matter, noting that ministers would “take the time to get this right”. The administration has pledged to make policy proposals on AI and copyright by next year.
