An activist group has claimed to have harvested millions of songs from the popular streaming service and is preparing to release them publicly.
Possible Boost for Artificial Intelligence Development
Observers said the apparent leak could boost artificial intelligence firms looking for data to develop their technology.
A group called Anna’s Archive said it had scraped 86 million music files from the platform and 256 million entries of associated data such as artist and record names. The company, which carries more than 100 million songs, stated that the leak did not constitute its entire inventory.
“We have located and disabled the nefarious user accounts that were involved in unlawful scraping,” stated a Spotify spokesperson.
The Stockholm-based company, which has more than 700 million subscribers worldwide, added that an investigation into unauthorized access found a external actor scraped public metadata and used illicit tactics to circumvent DRM protections.
Archive's Declared Mission and Concerns
The streaming service does not think the audio taken by Anna’s Archive has been released 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 claimed the music files represented 99.6% of all music streamed to by Spotify users and would be distributed via ‘torrents’, a means of exchanging large data files online.
“Naturally the service doesn’t have all the music in the world, but it’s a fantastic start,” said Anna’s Archive, which describes its purpose as “safeguarding humanity’s knowledge and heritage”.
Model Development and Intellectual Property Battleground
Ed Newton-Rex for protecting artists’ rights, said the breached music would probably be utilized for developing artificial intelligence systems.
“Training on pirated data is unfortunately widespread in the tech sector, so this accessed music is highly likely to end up training AI models,” he said.
The Anna’s Archive site alludes to LibGen, a huge online repository of copyrighted books that has reportedly been leveraged by Meta to train its systems.
The co-founder of an artificial intelligence company posted on the professional network that individuals of the public could in theory “create their own private free version of the service”. The executive said it could also enable tech companies to “train on modern music at scale”.
Copyright has emerged as a key issue between artists, writers and creatives on one side and tech giants on the other.
Policy Proposals 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. Almost every respondent to a government consultation on the proposal has backed artists’ apprehensions.
The secretary of state for science, research 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 administration has pledged to make regulatory plans on AI and copyright by next year.
