A digital rights group has stated to have scraped a vast number of songs from Spotify and is getting ready to publish them publicly.
Potential Impetus for AI Training
Industry experts noted the apparent data breach could boost AI companies looking for data to develop their models.
A group known as Anna’s Archive said it had obtained 86 million music files from Spotify and 256 million entries of associated data such as artist and album names. Spotify, which carries more than 100 million songs, stated that the leak did not represent its entire inventory.
“We have identified and deactivated the malicious user accounts that were involved in unlawful scraping,” stated a company representative.
The Swedish service, which has more than 700 million users worldwide, added that an investigation into unauthorised access found a external actor scraped public metadata and used questionable methods to circumvent DRM [digital rights management].
Archive's Declared Mission and Concerns
Spotify does not believe the music taken by Anna’s Archive has been made public yet. Anna’s Archive, which is recognized for providing links to pirated books, wrote in a blog it wanted to create a ‘historical repository’ for music.
They claimed the music files represented 99.6% of all music streamed to by its listeners and would be distributed via ‘peer-to-peer networks’, a method of exchanging large data files online.
“Naturally Spotify doesn’t have all the music in the world, but it’s a great start,” commented Anna’s Archive, which frames its mission as “preserving humanity’s knowledge and heritage”.
AI Training and Copyright Debate
Ed Newton-Rex for protecting artists’ rights, remarked the leaked music would probably be used for developing artificial intelligence systems.
“Educating models on illegally sourced material is sadly widespread in the tech sector, so this stolen music is almost certain to end up instructing AI models,” he said.
The Anna’s Archive site alludes to LibGen, a huge online archive of copyrighted books that has allegedly been used by Meta to train its AI models.
A founder of an AI startup wrote on LinkedIn that individuals of the public could in principle “create their own private free equivalent of Spotify”. He added it could also enable tech companies to “educate models on modern music at a large volume”.
Copyright 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, artists and writers have protested against a ministerial proposal to let AI companies utilize protected work without permission unless the owner opts out. Virtually every respondent to a government call for evidence on the idea has supported artists’ apprehensions.
A government minister for science, innovation and development informed parliament this month there was “little consensus” on the matter, adding that ministers would “take the time to get this right”. The administration has pledged to make regulatory plans on AI and copyright by next year.
