A digital rights organization has claimed to have scraped millions of songs from Spotify and is getting ready to publish them online.
Potential Boost for Artificial Intelligence Development
Industry experts said the apparent data breach could boost AI companies searching for data to develop their models.
A group called Anna’s Archive said it had scraped 86 million audio tracks from Spotify and 256 million rows of metadata such as performer and record names. Spotify, which hosts more than 100 million tracks, 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 Stockholm-based company, which has more than 700 million users worldwide, added that an investigation into unauthorized access identified a third party collected public metadata and employed illicit methods to bypass DRM protections.
Archive's Declared Goal and Concerns
The streaming service does not believe the audio taken by Anna’s Archive has been released 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 music files represented 99.6% of all music listened to by its listeners and would be distributed via ‘torrents’, a means of exchanging large digital files online.
“Of course the service doesn’t have all the music in the world, but it’s a great start,” commented Anna’s Archive, which frames its mission as “safeguarding humanity’s knowledge and heritage”.
Model Development and Copyright Battleground
A composer and campaigner for defending artists’ rights, said the breached music would probably be used for developing AI models.
“Training on pirated material is sadly widespread in the AI industry, so this stolen music is almost certain to be used training AI models,” he said.
The Anna’s Archive site alludes to LibGen, a vast online archive of copyrighted books that has allegedly been leveraged by the parent company of Facebook to train its AI models.
A founder of an artificial intelligence company posted on LinkedIn that individuals of the public could in principle “build their own personal free equivalent of the service”. The executive added it could also enable technology firms to “train on modern music at scale”.
Copyright has become a key issue between artists, writers and creatives on one side and AI companies on the other.
Government Proposals and Responses
Across Britain, artists and writers have raised concerns against a ministerial proposal to allow AI companies use protected work without permission unless the owner signals. Virtually every respondent to a government call for evidence on the proposal has backed artists’ apprehensions.
The secretary of state for science, research and technology informed parliament this month there was “no clear consensus” on the issue, 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.
