Advocacy Collective Asserts to Have Scraped Countless of Music Files from the Streaming Giant
A digital rights organization has stated to have harvested millions of tracks from Spotify and is preparing to release them publicly.
Potential Boost for AI Development
Industry experts said the seeming leak could aid artificial intelligence firms searching for material to train their technology.
An entity known as Anna’s Archive said it had obtained 86 million audio tracks from the platform and 256 million rows of associated data such as artist and record names. The company, which carries more than 100 million tracks, stated that the breach did not constitute its entire catalog.
“We have identified and disabled the malicious user accounts that engaged in illegal scraping,” said a company representative.
The Stockholm-based service, which has more than 700 million subscribers worldwide, added that an inquiry into unauthorised access identified a external actor collected public metadata and used questionable methods to circumvent DRM protections.
Group's Declared Mission and Concerns
Spotify does not think the audio acquired by Anna’s Archive has been made public 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 asserted 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.
“Naturally the service 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 heritage”.
AI Training and Intellectual Property Battleground
A composer and campaigner for defending artists’ copyright, remarked the leaked music would probably be utilized for developing artificial intelligence systems.
“Educating models on illegally sourced material is unfortunately common in the AI industry, 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 vast online repository of pirated books that has allegedly been leveraged by the parent company of Facebook to train its AI models.
The co-founder of an AI startup wrote on the professional network that members of the public could in principle “build their own private free version of Spotify”. The executive added it could also enable tech companies to “train on modern music at a large volume”.
Copyright has become a key issue between creatives, authors and creatives on one side and AI companies on the other.
Government Proposals and Reactions
Across Britain, creative professionals have protested against a government suggestion to let AI companies use copyright-protected work without consent unless the rights holder signals. Virtually every respondent to a government consultation on the idea has supported artists’ concerns.
The secretary of state for science, innovation and technology told parliament this month there was “little consensus” on the issue, noting that ministers would “take the time to get this correct”. The government has pledged to make policy proposals on AI and copyright by next year.
