An activist group has stated to have harvested millions of songs from the popular streaming service and is preparing to release them online.
Possible Boost for AI Development
Industry experts noted the seeming leak could boost AI companies looking for material to train their technology.
A group known as Anna’s Archive said it had scraped 86 million music files from the platform and 256 million entries of associated data such as artist and record names. Spotify, which hosts more than 100 million tracks, stated that the breach did not represent its full inventory.
“We have identified and disabled the malicious user accounts that engaged in illegal scraping,” stated a company representative.
The Stockholm-based service, which has more than 700 million subscribers worldwide, further explained that an investigation into unauthorised access identified a third party collected public metadata and used questionable methods to bypass DRM [digital rights management].
Group's Stated Mission and Worries
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.
The group asserted the music files accounted for 99.6% of all music listened to by its listeners and would be distributed via ‘peer-to-peer networks’, a method of exchanging large data files online.
“Naturally the service doesn’t have all the music in the world, but it’s a great start,” commented Anna’s Archive, which describes its purpose as “preserving humanity’s knowledge and heritage”.
AI Training and Intellectual Property Debate
Ed Newton-Rex for defending artists’ copyright, remarked the breached music would likely be used for training artificial intelligence systems.
“Training on illegally sourced material is sadly common in the tech sector, so this stolen music is highly likely to end up instructing AI models,” he said.
The Anna’s Archive site makes references to LibGen, a huge online archive of pirated books that has reportedly been leveraged by Meta to train its AI models.
The co-founder of an artificial intelligence company wrote on the professional network that members of the public could in principle “build their own private free version of Spotify”. The executive added it could also enable tech companies to “train on contemporary 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.
Government Proposals and Reactions
In the UK, artists and writers have protested against a government proposal to allow AI companies use protected work without consent unless the rights holder opts out. Almost every participant to a government call for evidence on the proposal has supported artists’ concerns.
The secretary of state for technology, research and development told parliament this month there was “no clear consensus” on the matter, adding that ministers would “take the time to get this correct”. The administration has committed to make policy proposals on AI and copyright by next year.
