A digital rights group has stated to have scraped millions of songs from Spotify and is preparing to publish them publicly.
Possible Boost for Artificial Intelligence Development
Industry experts said the seeming leak could boost AI companies searching for data to develop their models.
A group called Anna’s Archive reported it had scraped 86 million audio tracks from the platform and 256 million rows of metadata such as artist and album names. The company, which carries more than 100 million tracks, confirmed that the breach did not constitute its entire inventory.
“We have located and disabled the nefarious user accounts that engaged in illegal scraping,” stated a Spotify spokesperson.
The Stockholm-based service, which has more than 700 million users worldwide, added that an inquiry into unauthorised access found a external actor scraped public metadata and employed illicit methods to circumvent DRM [digital rights management].
Group's Declared Mission and Concerns
Spotify does not think the audio taken by Anna’s Archive has been made public yet. Anna’s Archive, which is known for providing links to pirated books, wrote in a blog it wanted to create a ‘historical repository’ for music.
The group claimed the music files represented 99.6% of all music streamed to by its listeners and would be shared via ‘peer-to-peer networks’, a method of exchanging large digital files online.
“Naturally Spotify doesn’t have all the music in the world, but it’s a fantastic start,” commented Anna’s Archive, which describes its mission as “safeguarding humanity’s information and culture”.
AI Training and Intellectual Property Battleground
A composer and campaigner for defending artists’ rights, said the leaked music would likely be utilized for developing artificial intelligence systems.
“Training on pirated material is unfortunately widespread in the AI industry, so this stolen music is almost certain to be used training AI models,” he said.
The Anna’s Archive site makes references to a large online archive, a huge online repository of copyrighted books that has reportedly been used by the parent company of Facebook to train its AI models.
A founder of an AI startup wrote on the professional network that individuals of the public could in theory “build their own personal free equivalent of Spotify”. The executive said it could also enable technology firms to “train on modern music at scale”.
Intellectual property law has become a key issue between artists, writers and creatives on one side and AI companies on the other.
Policy Proposals and Responses
Across Britain, artists and writers have protested against a government suggestion to let AI companies utilize protected work without permission unless the rights holder opts out. Almost every respondent to a government consultation on the proposal has supported artists’ apprehensions.
The secretary of state for science, research and development told parliament this month there was “little consensus” on the matter, adding that ministers would “use the time to get this right”. The government has pledged to make policy proposals on AI and copyright by next year.
