A digital rights organization has claimed to have scraped a vast number of songs from the popular streaming service and is preparing to publish them online.
Potential Boost for AI Training
Observers said the seeming leak could boost artificial intelligence firms searching for material to train their models.
A group known as Anna’s Archive said it had scraped 86 million audio tracks from the platform and 256 million rows of metadata such as artist and record names. Spotify, which carries more than 100 million songs, confirmed that the breach did not represent its entire inventory.
“We have located and disabled the nefarious user accounts that were involved in illegal scraping,” said a company representative.
The Swedish service, which has more than 700 million subscribers worldwide, added that an inquiry into unauthorized access found a third party collected public metadata and used questionable tactics to circumvent DRM protections.
Archive's Declared Mission and Concerns
Spotify does not think the audio taken by Anna’s Archive has been made public yet. Anna’s Archive, which is recognized for offering links to pirated books, said 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 listened to by its listeners and would be shared via ‘torrents’, a method of exchanging large digital files online.
“Naturally the service doesn’t have all the music in the world, but it’s a great beginning,” said Anna’s Archive, which frames its mission as “safeguarding humanity’s knowledge and culture”.
AI Training and Copyright Debate
Ed Newton-Rex for protecting artists’ rights, said the leaked music would likely be used for training artificial intelligence systems.
“Educating models on illegally sourced material is unfortunately common in the tech sector, so this accessed 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 archive of pirated books that has allegedly been leveraged by the parent company of Facebook to develop its AI models.
The co-founder of an artificial intelligence company wrote on the professional network that members of the public could in theory “create their own personal free equivalent of Spotify”. The executive added it could also enable technology firms to “educate models on contemporary music at scale”.
Intellectual property law has become a battleground between artists, authors and content creators on one side and AI companies on the other.
Policy Proposals and Reactions
In the UK, creative professionals have protested against a ministerial suggestion to let AI companies use copyright-protected work without permission unless the owner opts out. Almost every participant to a government consultation on the proposal has supported artists’ apprehensions.
The secretary of state for science, research and technology informed parliament this month there was “little consensus” on the matter, noting that ministers would “use the time to get this right”. The government has committed to make regulatory plans on AI and copyright by next year.
