A digital rights organization has stated to have harvested millions of songs from the popular streaming service and is preparing to publish them publicly.
Possible Boost for Artificial Intelligence Development
Industry experts said the apparent data breach could aid AI companies searching for material to develop their models.
A group called Anna’s Archive reported it had scraped 86 million audio tracks from Spotify 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 catalog.
“We have located and disabled the nefarious user accounts that were involved in illegal scraping,” said a Spotify spokesperson.
The Swedish service, which has more than 700 million subscribers worldwide, added that an inquiry into unauthorized access found a external actor scraped public metadata and employed questionable tactics to bypass DRM [digital rights management].
Archive's Declared Mission and Worries
The streaming service does not believe the music taken by Anna’s Archive has been released yet. Anna’s Archive, which is known for offering links to copyright-infringing books, said in a blog it wanted to create a ‘preservation archive’ for music.
The group claimed the music files accounted for 99.6% of all music listened to by Spotify users and would be distributed via ‘torrents’, a method of exchanging large digital files online.
“Of course Spotify doesn’t have all the music in the world, but it’s a great start,” commented Anna’s Archive, which describes its purpose as “preserving humanity’s knowledge and heritage”.
AI Training and Copyright Battleground
A composer and campaigner for protecting artists’ rights, remarked the leaked music would probably be utilized for training AI models.
“Training on pirated data is sadly common in the tech sector, so this accessed music is highly likely to end up training AI models,” he said.
The group's website makes references to a large online archive, a huge online repository of copyrighted books that has reportedly been leveraged by Meta to train its AI models.
A founder of an AI startup posted on the professional network that individuals of the public could in principle “build their own personal free equivalent of Spotify”. The executive said it could also allow technology firms to “educate models on modern music at a large volume”.
Intellectual property law has become a key issue between creatives, writers and content creators on one side and tech giants on the other.
Government Proposals and Reactions
Across Britain, artists and writers have protested against a government suggestion to let AI companies utilize protected work without consent unless the rights holder signals. Virtually every participant to a government consultation on the idea has backed artists’ apprehensions.
A government minister for technology, innovation and technology told parliament this month there was “little consensus” on the issue, 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.
