An activist group has claimed to have harvested millions of tracks from the popular streaming service and is getting ready to publish them online.
Potential Boost for Artificial Intelligence Training
Industry experts said the apparent data breach could boost artificial intelligence firms searching for data to train their models.
A group called Anna’s Archive said it had scraped 86 million music files from Spotify and 256 million rows of associated data such as artist and record names. Spotify, which hosts more than 100 million tracks, stated that the breach did not constitute its full catalog.
“We have located and disabled the nefarious user accounts that were involved in unlawful scraping,” said a company spokesperson.
The Stockholm-based company, which has more than 700 million subscribers worldwide, further explained that an inquiry into unauthorised access found a third party scraped public metadata and used illicit methods to circumvent DRM protections.
Group's Stated Mission and Worries
Spotify does not think the music acquired by Anna’s Archive has been released yet. Anna’s Archive, which is recognized for offering links to copyright-infringing books, said 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 shared via ‘torrents’, a means of sharing large digital files online.
“Of course the service doesn’t have all the music in the world, but it’s a great start,” said Anna’s Archive, which describes its purpose as “preserving humanity’s information and heritage”.
Model Development and Intellectual Property Debate
A composer and campaigner for defending artists’ copyright, remarked the breached music would probably be utilized for training artificial intelligence systems.
“Educating models on illegally sourced data is sadly common in the AI industry, so this stolen music is highly likely to end up training AI models,” he stated.
The Anna’s Archive site alludes to a large online archive, a huge online repository of pirated books that has allegedly been leveraged by Meta to train its systems.
A founder of an AI startup posted on LinkedIn that members of the public could in theory “create their own personal free equivalent of Spotify”. The executive said it could also enable technology firms to “train on modern music at scale”.
Intellectual property law has become a battleground between creatives, authors and content creators on one side and tech giants on the other.
Government Proposals and Reactions
In the UK, creative professionals have protested against a government proposal to allow AI companies use protected work without consent unless the owner opts out. Virtually every participant to a government call for evidence on the idea has supported artists’ apprehensions.
A government minister for science, research and technology told parliament this month there was “little consensus” on the issue, noting that ministers would “take the time to get this right”. The government has committed to make policy proposals on AI and copyright by next year.
