An activist organization has claimed to have harvested millions of songs from Spotify and is preparing to release them online.
Possible Impetus for Artificial Intelligence Training
Observers said the seeming data breach could boost artificial intelligence firms looking for data to develop their technology.
A group known as Anna’s Archive said it had scraped 86 million music files from the platform and 256 million rows of metadata such as artist and record names. The company, which carries more than 100 million tracks, stated that the leak did not represent its entire catalog.
“We have located and disabled the nefarious user accounts that were involved in unlawful scraping,” said a company spokesperson.
The Stockholm-based service, which has more than 700 million users worldwide, further explained that an investigation into unauthorised access found a third party scraped public metadata and used questionable tactics to circumvent DRM [digital rights management].
Archive's Stated 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 offering links to pirated books, said in a blog it wanted to create a ‘preservation archive’ for music.
The group asserted the music files represented 99.6% of all music streamed to by Spotify users and would be distributed via ‘torrents’, a method of sharing large data files online.
“Naturally the service doesn’t have all the music in the world, but it’s a great start,” said Anna’s Archive, which describes its mission as “preserving humanity’s information and culture”.
AI Training and Intellectual Property Debate
A composer and campaigner for defending artists’ rights, said the breached music would probably be used for training AI models.
“Educating models on illegally sourced data is unfortunately widespread in the tech sector, so this stolen music is almost certain to end up training AI models,” he stated.
The Anna’s Archive site alludes to a large online archive, a huge online archive of pirated books that has allegedly been used by the parent company of Facebook to develop its systems.
A founder of an artificial intelligence company wrote on LinkedIn that individuals of the public could in theory “create their own private free equivalent of Spotify”. He said it could also allow technology firms to “train on contemporary music at scale”.
Copyright has emerged as a battleground between creatives, authors and creatives on one side and AI companies on the other.
Policy Proposals and Reactions
In the UK, artists and writers have protested against a government suggestion to let AI companies use protected work without consent unless the rights holder signals. Almost every participant to a government consultation on the idea has supported artists’ apprehensions.
The secretary of state for technology, research and development informed parliament this month there was “no clear consensus” on the matter, adding that ministers would “take the time to get this correct”. The government has pledged to make regulatory plans on AI and copyright by March 2025.
