A digital rights group has stated to have scraped millions of songs from Spotify and is getting ready to release them publicly.
Potential Boost for Artificial Intelligence Training
Industry experts said the seeming data breach could aid artificial intelligence firms searching for material to train their technology.
An entity called Anna’s Archive said it had obtained 86 million audio tracks from the platform and 256 million rows of metadata such as artist and record names. The company, which hosts more than 100 million songs, confirmed that the breach did not represent its full catalog.
“We have located and disabled the nefarious user accounts that were involved in unlawful scraping,” stated a Spotify representative.
The Swedish service, which has more than 700 million users worldwide, added that an investigation into unauthorised access identified a third party scraped public metadata and used questionable tactics to bypass DRM protections.
Group's Declared Mission and Concerns
Spotify does not believe the music taken by Anna’s Archive has been made public yet. Anna’s Archive, which is recognized for offering links to copyright-infringing books, wrote 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 ‘peer-to-peer networks’, a method of exchanging large data 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 mission as “preserving humanity’s knowledge and culture”.
AI Training and Intellectual Property Battleground
Ed Newton-Rex for protecting artists’ rights, said the leaked music would likely be used for training AI models.
“Educating models on illegally sourced data is sadly widespread in the tech sector, so this stolen music is almost certain to end up instructing AI models,” he stated.
The group's website makes references to LibGen, a huge online archive of pirated books that has reportedly been leveraged by the parent company of Facebook to train its AI models.
The co-founder of an AI startup posted on LinkedIn that individuals of the public could in principle “create their own personal free equivalent of Spotify”. The executive added it could also allow technology firms to “educate models on contemporary music at a large volume”.
Intellectual property law has emerged as a battleground between artists, writers and creatives on one side and AI companies on the other.
Policy Considerations and Reactions
Across Britain, artists and writers have raised concerns against a government proposal to let 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’ concerns.
A government minister for technology, innovation and development informed parliament this month there was “no clear consensus” on the matter, adding that ministers would “take the time to get this correct”. The government has committed to make policy proposals on AI and copyright by next year.
