A digital rights organization has stated to have harvested millions of tracks from Spotify and is preparing to publish them online.
Potential Boost for AI Development
Observers said the seeming leak could boost artificial intelligence firms searching for material to train their technology.
An entity called Anna’s Archive said it had scraped 86 million music files from Spotify and 256 million rows of metadata such as artist and album names. The company, which hosts more than 100 million songs, stated that the breach did not constitute its full catalog.
“We have located and deactivated the nefarious user accounts that engaged in unlawful scraping,” said a company spokesperson.
The Stockholm-based service, which has more than 700 million subscribers worldwide, added that an investigation into unauthorized access found a third party collected public metadata and employed questionable methods to bypass DRM [digital rights management].
Group's Stated Mission and Worries
The streaming service does not believe the music taken by Anna’s Archive has been made public yet. Anna’s Archive, which is known for providing links to copyright-infringing books, wrote in a blog it wanted to create a ‘preservation archive’ for music.
They claimed the music files accounted for 99.6% of all music listened to by Spotify users and would be distributed via ‘torrents’, a method of sharing large data files online.
“Naturally Spotify doesn’t have all the music in the world, but it’s a fantastic start,” commented Anna’s Archive, which frames its purpose as “safeguarding humanity’s knowledge and culture”.
AI Training and Intellectual Property Debate
A composer and campaigner for protecting artists’ rights, remarked the breached music would probably be used for developing artificial intelligence systems.
“Training on illegally sourced data is unfortunately common in the tech sector, so this stolen music is almost certain to end up instructing AI models,” he stated.
The group's website makes references to a large online archive, a huge online archive of copyrighted books that has allegedly been leveraged by the parent company of Facebook to develop its systems.
The co-founder of an artificial intelligence company wrote on the professional network that individuals of the public could in theory “create their own private free equivalent of Spotify”. The executive added it could also allow technology firms 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, artists and writers have protested against a government proposal to allow AI companies use protected work without consent unless the rights holder opts out. Virtually every respondent to a government consultation on the idea has supported artists’ concerns.
A government minister for technology, research 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 committed to make regulatory plans on AI and copyright by next year.
