An activist organization has claimed to have scraped a vast number of songs from the popular streaming service and is preparing to release them online.
Possible Impetus for AI Development
Industry experts noted the seeming leak could aid AI companies searching for material to train their models.
An entity known as Anna’s Archive said it had obtained 86 million audio tracks from Spotify and 256 million rows of associated data such as artist and record names. The company, which hosts more than 100 million songs, confirmed that the leak did not constitute its entire inventory.
“We have located and disabled the nefarious user accounts that engaged in unlawful scraping,” stated a Spotify representative.
The Stockholm-based company, which has more than 700 million users worldwide, further explained that an inquiry into unauthorised access found a external actor scraped public metadata and used questionable methods to circumvent DRM protections.
Group's Declared Mission and Worries
The streaming service does not believe the music acquired 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 ‘preservation archive’ for music.
The group asserted the audio files represented 99.6% of all music streamed to by its listeners and would be shared via ‘torrents’, a means of exchanging large digital files online.
“Of course the service doesn’t have all the music in the world, but it’s a fantastic start,” commented Anna’s Archive, which describes its purpose as “preserving humanity’s information and heritage”.
Model Development and Copyright Debate
Ed Newton-Rex for defending artists’ rights, remarked the breached music would probably be used for developing AI models.
“Training on illegally sourced data is sadly common in the tech sector, so this accessed 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 copyrighted books that has allegedly been used by the parent company of Facebook to train its systems.
The co-founder of an AI startup posted on the professional network that members of the public could in principle “build their own private free equivalent of the service”. He added it could also allow technology firms to “educate models on modern music at a large volume”.
Copyright has emerged as a battleground between artists, writers and creatives on one side and AI companies on the other.
Government Proposals and Reactions
In the UK, artists and writers have raised concerns against a ministerial suggestion to let AI companies utilize copyright-protected work without permission unless the owner opts out. Virtually every respondent to a government consultation on the proposal has supported artists’ apprehensions.
The secretary of state for science, innovation and technology informed parliament this month there was “no clear consensus” on the matter, noting that ministers would “use the time to get this correct”. The government has committed to make regulatory plans on AI and copyright by next year.
