An activist organization has stated to have harvested millions of songs from Spotify and is getting ready to publish them publicly.
Possible Boost for AI Training
Observers said the apparent data breach could boost artificial intelligence firms looking for material to develop their models.
An entity called Anna’s Archive reported it had obtained 86 million music files from the platform and 256 million rows of associated data such as artist and album names. Spotify, which carries more than 100 million songs, stated that the leak did not represent its entire inventory.
“We have located and disabled the nefarious user accounts that engaged in unlawful scraping,” stated a Spotify representative.
The Swedish service, which has more than 700 million subscribers worldwide, added that an investigation into unauthorized access identified a external actor scraped public metadata and employed illicit methods to bypass DRM [digital rights management].
Archive's Declared Goal and Concerns
Spotify does not believe the audio taken by Anna’s Archive has been made public 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.
The group claimed the audio files represented 99.6% of all music streamed to by its listeners and would be distributed via ‘peer-to-peer networks’, a means of sharing large digital files online.
“Naturally Spotify doesn’t have all the music in the world, but it’s a fantastic start,” said Anna’s Archive, which frames its mission as “preserving humanity’s knowledge and heritage”.
AI Training and Intellectual Property Battleground
Ed Newton-Rex for defending artists’ copyright, said the leaked music would likely be used for developing AI models.
“Training on illegally sourced data is sadly common in the AI industry, so this accessed music is highly likely to end up training AI models,” he stated.
The group's website makes references to a large online archive, a huge online repository of copyrighted books that has reportedly been used by the parent company of Facebook to train its systems.
The co-founder of an AI startup wrote on the professional network that members of the public could in principle “build their own personal free equivalent of the service”. He added it could also allow technology firms to “train on modern music at scale”.
Copyright has become a key issue between creatives, authors and creatives on one side and AI companies on the other.
Policy Considerations and Reactions
Across Britain, creative professionals have raised concerns against a government suggestion to let AI companies utilize copyright-protected work without consent unless the rights holder signals. Virtually every respondent to a government call for evidence on the idea has supported artists’ apprehensions.
The secretary of state for technology, innovation and technology told parliament this month there was “no clear consensus” on the issue, adding that ministers would “take the time to get this right”. The government has pledged to make policy proposals on AI and copyright by next year.
