A digital rights organization has stated to have scraped millions of songs from Spotify and is getting ready to release them online.
Possible Impetus for AI Development
Industry experts said the seeming data breach could boost AI companies looking for data to develop their technology.
An entity known as Anna’s Archive reported 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 leak did not represent its entire inventory.
“We have located and disabled the nefarious user accounts that were involved in unlawful scraping,” said a Spotify spokesperson.
The Swedish company, which has more than 700 million users worldwide, further explained that an investigation into unauthorized access identified a external actor collected public metadata and used questionable methods to bypass DRM [digital rights management].
Group's Declared Goal and Concerns
Spotify does not think the music acquired by Anna’s Archive has been made public yet. Anna’s Archive, which is recognized for providing links to pirated books, wrote in a blog it wanted to create a ‘preservation archive’ for music.
The group claimed the audio files represented 99.6% of all music streamed to by its listeners and would be distributed via ‘torrents’, a means of sharing large data files online.
“Naturally the service doesn’t have all the music in the world, but it’s a great beginning,” commented Anna’s Archive, which describes its mission as “safeguarding humanity’s information and heritage”.
Model Development and Intellectual Property Battleground
A composer and campaigner for defending artists’ rights, said the leaked music would likely be utilized for training artificial intelligence systems.
“Training on pirated material is unfortunately widespread in the tech sector, so this accessed music is almost certain to end up training AI models,” he said.
The Anna’s Archive site alludes to LibGen, a huge online repository of pirated books that has allegedly been used by Meta to develop its AI models.
A founder of an artificial intelligence company wrote on LinkedIn that members of the public could in theory “build their own personal free version of the service”. He said it could also enable tech companies to “train on contemporary music at a large volume”.
Intellectual property law has become a key issue between artists, writers and creatives on one side and tech giants on the other.
Policy Considerations and Responses
Across Britain, creative professionals have raised concerns against a ministerial proposal to allow AI companies utilize copyright-protected work without permission unless the rights holder opts out. Almost every participant to a government call for evidence on the idea has backed artists’ concerns.
A government minister for science, research and development told parliament this month there was “little consensus” on the issue, noting that ministers would “take the time to get this correct”. The government has pledged to make regulatory plans on AI and copyright by next year.
