A digital rights group has stated to have scraped a vast number of songs from Spotify and is getting ready to publish them online.
Potential Boost for Artificial Intelligence Training
Observers said the apparent leak could boost artificial intelligence firms searching for data to develop their technology.
A group known as Anna’s Archive said it had obtained 86 million audio tracks from the platform and 256 million entries of metadata such as artist and record names. Spotify, which carries more than 100 million songs, stated that the leak did not represent its entire inventory.
“We have identified and disabled the nefarious user accounts that engaged in unlawful scraping,” said a company spokesperson.
The Swedish company, which has more than 700 million subscribers worldwide, added that an inquiry into unauthorized access identified a external actor scraped public metadata and used illicit tactics to bypass DRM protections.
Archive's Declared Goal 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 copyright-infringing books, wrote in a blog it wanted to create a ‘historical repository’ for music.
The group asserted 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 Spotify doesn’t have all the music in the world, but it’s a great beginning,” commented Anna’s Archive, which frames its mission as “preserving humanity’s information and heritage”.
AI Training and Copyright Battleground
Ed Newton-Rex for defending artists’ copyright, said the leaked music would likely be used for developing artificial intelligence systems.
“Training on illegally sourced data is unfortunately common in the tech sector, so this stolen music is highly likely to end up training AI models,” he stated.
The Anna’s Archive site makes references to a large online archive, a huge online archive of pirated books that has allegedly been leveraged 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 “create their own personal free version 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 emerged as a battleground between artists, authors and creatives on one side and tech giants on the other.
Government Proposals and Responses
In the UK, creative professionals have protested against a ministerial proposal to let AI companies utilize copyright-protected work without permission unless the rights holder opts out. Virtually every respondent to a government consultation on the idea has backed artists’ concerns.
A government minister for technology, research and development informed parliament this month there was “little consensus” on the issue, noting that ministers would “use the time to get this right”. The administration has committed to make regulatory plans on AI and copyright by next year.
