A digital rights organization has stated to have scraped millions of tracks from Spotify and is getting ready to publish them publicly.
Potential Impetus for Artificial Intelligence Development
Industry experts said the seeming leak could boost artificial intelligence firms searching for material to train their models.
An entity called Anna’s Archive said it had scraped 86 million audio tracks from the platform and 256 million rows of associated data such as performer and record names. Spotify, which hosts more than 100 million tracks, stated that the breach did not represent its entire inventory.
“We have identified and disabled the malicious user accounts that were involved in unlawful scraping,” stated a Spotify representative.
The Swedish company, which has more than 700 million subscribers worldwide, further explained that an inquiry into unauthorized access identified a third party scraped public metadata and employed illicit methods to bypass DRM protections.
Group's Declared Goal and Concerns
The streaming service 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 accounted for 99.6% of all music listened to by Spotify users and would be shared via ‘torrents’, a means of exchanging large digital files online.
“Of course Spotify doesn’t have all the music in the world, but it’s a great beginning,” said Anna’s Archive, which describes its mission as “preserving humanity’s information and heritage”.
Model Development and Copyright Battleground
Ed Newton-Rex for protecting artists’ rights, said the breached music would likely be used for training artificial intelligence systems.
“Educating models on illegally sourced material is sadly widespread in the tech sector, so this stolen music is highly likely to end up instructing AI models,” he said.
The Anna’s Archive site makes references to LibGen, a vast online repository of pirated books that has allegedly been leveraged by the parent company of Facebook to train its AI models.
A founder of an AI startup wrote on the professional network that members of the public could in principle “build their own private free version of the service”. The executive said it could also allow tech companies to “train on modern music at scale”.
Copyright has emerged as a battleground between artists, writers and creatives on one side and AI companies on the other.
Policy Proposals and Responses
Across Britain, artists and writers have raised concerns against a ministerial suggestion to allow AI companies use protected work without consent unless the owner signals. Virtually every respondent to a government call for evidence on the proposal has backed artists’ concerns.
A government minister for technology, 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 pledged to make regulatory plans on AI and copyright by next year.
