An activist organization has stated to have harvested millions of tracks from the popular streaming service and is preparing to publish them publicly.
Possible Boost for AI Training
Industry experts said the seeming leak could boost artificial intelligence firms searching for data to train their technology.
A group known as Anna’s Archive said it had obtained 86 million music files from the platform and 256 million entries of metadata such as artist and record names. The company, which hosts more than 100 million songs, confirmed that the breach did not represent its entire inventory.
“We have located and disabled the malicious user accounts that were involved in unlawful scraping,” said a Spotify representative.
The Swedish company, which has more than 700 million subscribers worldwide, added that an inquiry into unauthorized access identified a third party scraped public metadata and employed illicit tactics to bypass DRM [digital rights management].
Group's Declared Goal and Concerns
Spotify does not believe the audio 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 ‘preservation archive’ for music.
The group claimed the audio files represented 99.6% of all music streamed to by its listeners and would be distributed via ‘peer-to-peer networks’, a method of sharing large data files online.
“Of course Spotify doesn’t have all the music in the world, but it’s a great start,” commented Anna’s Archive, which describes its purpose as “safeguarding humanity’s knowledge and heritage”.
AI Training and Copyright Battleground
A composer and campaigner for defending artists’ copyright, remarked the breached music would likely be utilized for training AI models.
“Educating models on illegally sourced data is sadly widespread in the tech sector, so this stolen music is highly likely to end up instructing AI models,” he stated.
The Anna’s Archive site makes references to a large online archive, a huge online archive of copyrighted books that has allegedly been used by Meta to train its systems.
The co-founder of an AI startup wrote on LinkedIn that individuals of the public could in theory “build their own personal free equivalent of the service”. He said it could also allow tech companies to “train on modern music at scale”.
Intellectual property law has become a key issue between artists, authors and creatives on one side and tech giants on the other.
Policy Proposals and Responses
In the UK, artists and writers have protested against a ministerial proposal to let AI companies use copyright-protected work without consent unless the rights holder signals. Virtually every participant to a government call for evidence on the proposal has supported artists’ apprehensions.
A government minister for technology, research and development told parliament this month there was “little consensus” on the matter, adding that ministers would “use the time to get this correct”. The government has pledged to make regulatory plans on AI and copyright by next year.
