A digital rights organization has stated to have scraped millions of songs from the popular streaming service and is preparing to publish them online.
Potential Boost for AI Development
Industry experts noted the seeming leak could aid artificial intelligence firms searching for data to develop their models.
An entity known as Anna’s Archive said it had obtained 86 million audio tracks from Spotify and 256 million rows of associated data such as artist and record names. The company, which hosts more than 100 million songs, confirmed that the breach did not represent its entire catalog.
“We have located and disabled the nefarious user accounts that were involved in unlawful scraping,” said a Spotify representative.
The Swedish company, which has more than 700 million users worldwide, further explained that an inquiry into unauthorized access found a external actor scraped public metadata and employed questionable methods to bypass DRM protections.
Archive's Declared Goal and Concerns
The streaming service does not think the music taken by Anna’s Archive has been made public yet. Anna’s Archive, which is recognized for offering links to pirated books, wrote 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 shared via ‘peer-to-peer networks’, a means of sharing large data 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 purpose as “preserving humanity’s knowledge and heritage”.
AI Training and Intellectual Property Battleground
Ed Newton-Rex for defending artists’ copyright, said the leaked music would probably be utilized for training artificial intelligence systems.
“Training on pirated data is unfortunately common in the AI industry, so this stolen music is almost certain to be used training AI models,” he stated.
The Anna’s Archive site alludes to LibGen, a vast online archive of copyrighted books that has reportedly been leveraged by the parent company of Facebook to train its AI models.
The co-founder of an artificial intelligence company posted on the professional network that members of the public could in theory “create their own private free equivalent of the service”. The executive added it could also allow technology firms to “train on modern music at a large volume”.
Intellectual property law has emerged as a key issue between creatives, authors and content creators on one side and AI companies on the other.
Policy Considerations and Responses
In the UK, artists and writers have raised concerns against a ministerial proposal to let AI companies utilize copyright-protected work without permission unless the owner signals. Almost every participant to a government call for evidence on the proposal has supported artists’ concerns.
A government minister for technology, research and development informed parliament this month there was “little consensus” on the matter, noting that ministers would “take the time to get this right”. The administration has pledged to make policy proposals on AI and copyright by next year.
