A digital rights group has stated to have harvested a vast number of tracks from the popular streaming service and is preparing to publish them publicly.
Potential Boost for Artificial Intelligence Training
Observers said the seeming data breach could boost AI companies searching for material to develop their models.
A group known as Anna’s Archive said it had obtained 86 million music files from the platform and 256 million entries of metadata such as artist and album names. The company, which hosts more than 100 million songs, stated that the leak did not represent its entire catalog.
“We have located and disabled the malicious user accounts that were involved in illegal scraping,” said a Spotify spokesperson.
The Swedish company, which has more than 700 million users worldwide, added that an investigation into unauthorized access found a third party scraped public metadata and employed questionable tactics to bypass DRM protections.
Group's Stated Goal and Concerns
The streaming service does not think the music taken by Anna’s Archive has been released yet. Anna’s Archive, which is recognized for offering links to copyright-infringing books, wrote in a blog it wanted to create a ‘historical repository’ for music.
The group claimed the audio files accounted for 99.6% of all music listened to by Spotify users and would be shared via ‘torrents’, a means of sharing large digital files online.
“Of course the service doesn’t have all the music in the world, but it’s a fantastic start,” said Anna’s Archive, which frames its purpose as “safeguarding humanity’s knowledge and heritage”.
Model Development and Copyright Debate
A composer and campaigner for protecting artists’ rights, remarked the breached music would probably be utilized for developing AI models.
“Training 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 makes references to a large online archive, a huge online archive of pirated books that has allegedly been used by the parent company of Facebook to train its AI models.
A founder of an artificial intelligence company wrote on the professional network that members of the public could in theory “create their own personal free equivalent of Spotify”. He added it could also allow technology firms to “educate models on contemporary music at a large volume”.
Intellectual property law has emerged as a battleground between creatives, writers and content creators on one side and tech giants on the other.
Government Proposals and Responses
In the UK, creative professionals have protested against a ministerial suggestion to allow AI companies utilize protected work without consent unless the rights holder opts out. Virtually every respondent to a government consultation on the proposal has supported artists’ apprehensions.
The secretary of state for technology, innovation and development told parliament this month there was “little consensus” on the matter, noting that ministers would “use the time to get this right”. The government has committed to make policy proposals on AI and copyright by next year.
