An activist organization has stated to have harvested millions of tracks from Spotify and is getting ready to publish them publicly.
Potential Boost for Artificial Intelligence Development
Observers said the apparent leak could aid artificial intelligence firms searching for material to develop their technology.
A group known as Anna’s Archive said it had scraped 86 million audio tracks from Spotify and 256 million entries of associated data such as artist and album names. Spotify, which carries more than 100 million songs, confirmed that the breach did not represent its full inventory.
“We have located and deactivated the nefarious user accounts that engaged in illegal scraping,” said a Spotify representative.
The Swedish company, which has more than 700 million subscribers worldwide, added that an inquiry into unauthorised access found a external actor collected public metadata and employed questionable methods to circumvent DRM [digital rights management].
Archive's Declared Mission and Worries
Spotify 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 pirated books, said in a blog it wanted to create a ‘historical repository’ for music.
The group claimed the music files accounted for 99.6% of all music streamed to by Spotify users and would be distributed via ‘peer-to-peer networks’, 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 mission as “safeguarding humanity’s information and culture”.
AI Training and Intellectual Property Debate
Ed Newton-Rex for defending artists’ copyright, remarked the breached music would likely be utilized for developing artificial intelligence systems.
“Educating models on illegally sourced data is unfortunately widespread in the tech sector, so this stolen music is highly likely to be used training AI models,” he said.
The Anna’s Archive site makes references to a large online archive, a huge online archive of pirated books that has allegedly been used by the parent company of Facebook to train its AI models.
The co-founder of an AI startup wrote on the professional network that individuals of the public could in theory “build their own private free equivalent of the service”. He said it could also allow technology firms to “train on modern music at scale”.
Intellectual property law has emerged as a key issue between creatives, writers and content creators on one side and AI companies on the other.
Policy Proposals and Reactions
Across Britain, creative professionals have protested against a government suggestion to allow AI companies use copyright-protected work without consent unless the rights holder signals. Virtually every respondent to a government consultation on the idea has backed artists’ apprehensions.
A government minister for science, research and development told parliament this month there was “little consensus” on the issue, noting that ministers would “use the time to get this correct”. The administration has pledged to make regulatory plans on AI and copyright by next year.
