A digital rights group has stated to have harvested a vast number of songs from Spotify and is preparing to release them publicly.
Potential Boost for Artificial Intelligence Training
Observers said the seeming data breach could boost artificial intelligence firms looking for material to train their models.
An entity called Anna’s Archive said it had scraped 86 million audio tracks from Spotify and 256 million rows of metadata such as artist and album names. Spotify, which hosts more than 100 million songs, stated that the leak did not constitute its full catalog.
“We have located and deactivated the malicious 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 scraped public metadata and employed illicit methods to circumvent DRM protections.
Archive's Stated Goal and Concerns
The streaming service 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, said in a blog it wanted to create a ‘historical repository’ for music.
They asserted the audio files represented 99.6% of all music streamed to by its listeners and would be shared via ‘peer-to-peer networks’, a method of sharing large data files online.
“Naturally the service doesn’t have all the music in the world, but it’s a fantastic start,” commented Anna’s Archive, which frames its mission as “safeguarding humanity’s knowledge and culture”.
Model Development and Copyright Debate
Ed Newton-Rex for defending artists’ copyright, said the leaked music would likely be utilized for training artificial intelligence systems.
“Training on pirated material is sadly common in the AI industry, so this stolen music is highly likely to be used training AI models,” he said.
The Anna’s Archive site alludes to a large online archive, a vast online repository of pirated books that has allegedly been used by the parent company of Facebook to develop its AI models.
A founder of an artificial intelligence company wrote on LinkedIn that individuals of the public could in principle “create their own private free version of the service”. He said it could also enable tech companies to “educate models on contemporary music at scale”.
Copyright has emerged as a battleground between artists, authors and content creators on one side and tech giants on the other.
Government Proposals and Responses
In the UK, creative professionals have protested against a ministerial proposal to allow AI companies utilize copyright-protected work without permission unless the rights holder opts out. Virtually every participant to a government call for evidence on the proposal has backed artists’ apprehensions.
A government minister for science, innovation and development told parliament this month there was “no clear consensus” on the issue, noting 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.
