An activist group has stated to have harvested millions of songs from the popular streaming service and is preparing to release them online.
Possible Impetus for AI Development
Industry experts noted the apparent data breach could aid AI companies looking for data to train their models.
A group known as Anna’s Archive said it had scraped 86 million audio tracks from Spotify and 256 million entries of metadata such as artist and album names. The company, which carries more than 100 million songs, stated that the breach did not constitute its entire catalog.
“We have located and disabled the nefarious user accounts that were involved in unlawful scraping,” said a company representative.
The Swedish company, which has more than 700 million subscribers worldwide, added that an investigation into unauthorized access identified a external actor collected public metadata and employed illicit tactics to circumvent DRM [digital rights management].
Archive's Stated Goal and Worries
Spotify does not think the music taken by Anna’s Archive has been made public yet. Anna’s Archive, which is known for providing links to pirated books, said in a blog it wanted to create a ‘historical repository’ for music.
The group claimed the music files accounted for 99.6% of all music streamed 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 start,” said Anna’s Archive, which frames its mission as “safeguarding humanity’s information and culture”.
AI Training and Copyright Debate
Ed Newton-Rex for protecting artists’ rights, said the leaked 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 highly likely to end up training AI models,” he stated.
The group's website makes references to LibGen, a huge online archive of copyrighted books that has allegedly been leveraged by the parent company of Facebook to train its AI models.
A founder of an AI startup wrote on LinkedIn that members of the public could in theory “build their own private free version of the service”. He said it could also enable technology firms to “train on contemporary music at scale”.
Intellectual property law has become a battleground between creatives, authors and creatives on one side and tech giants on the other.
Policy Considerations and Reactions
Across Britain, artists and writers have raised concerns against a government suggestion to allow AI companies utilize protected work without permission unless the owner signals. Virtually every respondent to a government call for evidence on the idea has backed artists’ apprehensions.
The secretary of state for science, research and development told parliament this month there was “no clear consensus” on the matter, noting that ministers would “take the time to get this right”. The government has committed to make policy proposals on AI and copyright by next year.
