An activist organization has stated to have harvested millions of songs from Spotify and is getting ready to publish them publicly.
Potential Boost for AI Development
Industry experts said the apparent data breach could aid artificial intelligence firms searching for data to train their models.
A group called Anna’s Archive said it had obtained 86 million audio tracks from Spotify and 256 million entries of metadata such as artist and album names. The company, which carries more than 100 million songs, stated that the leak did not constitute its full catalog.
“We have identified and disabled the malicious user accounts that were involved in unlawful scraping,” said a company spokesperson.
The Stockholm-based service, which has more than 700 million subscribers worldwide, added that an inquiry into unauthorised access found a third party scraped public metadata and employed questionable tactics to bypass DRM [digital rights management].
Archive's Stated Goal and Concerns
Spotify does not think the music 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.
They claimed the audio files accounted for 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 beginning,” commented Anna’s Archive, which frames its mission as “preserving humanity’s information and culture”.
AI Training and Intellectual Property Battleground
Ed Newton-Rex for protecting artists’ copyright, said the leaked music would likely be used for developing AI models.
“Educating models on pirated material is sadly widespread in the AI industry, so this stolen music is highly likely to end up instructing AI models,” he said.
The Anna’s Archive site alludes 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 artificial intelligence company posted on LinkedIn that members of the public could in principle “create their own personal free version of the service”. The executive said it could also enable technology firms to “educate models on contemporary music at a large volume”.
Copyright has become a battleground between creatives, writers and content creators on one side and AI companies on the other.
Government Considerations and Reactions
Across Britain, creative professionals have raised concerns against a government suggestion to allow AI companies utilize copyright-protected work without permission unless the rights holder opts out. Virtually every participant to a government consultation on the proposal has supported artists’ concerns.
A government minister for technology, innovation and technology told parliament this month there was “no clear consensus” on the issue, noting that ministers would “use the time to get this right”. The government has pledged to make regulatory plans on AI and copyright by next year.
