An activist group has claimed to have scraped a vast number of songs from the popular streaming service and is preparing to publish them online.
Potential Impetus for Artificial Intelligence Training
Industry experts said the seeming data breach could aid artificial intelligence firms searching for material to train their models.
A group called 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 hosts more than 100 million songs, stated that the breach did not constitute its full inventory.
“We have located and deactivated the malicious user accounts that were involved in illegal scraping,” stated a Spotify spokesperson.
The Stockholm-based service, which has more than 700 million subscribers worldwide, added that an inquiry into unauthorized access found a external actor collected public metadata and employed illicit tactics to bypass DRM protections.
Archive's Stated Mission and Concerns
The streaming service does not think the music acquired by Anna’s Archive has been released yet. Anna’s Archive, which is known for offering links to pirated books, said in a blog it wanted to create a ‘preservation archive’ for music.
The group asserted 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 digital files online.
“Of course the service 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 culture”.
AI Training and Intellectual Property Debate
A composer and campaigner for protecting artists’ rights, remarked the leaked music would probably be used for training artificial intelligence systems.
“Training on pirated data is sadly common in the tech sector, so this accessed music is almost certain to end up training AI models,” he said.
The Anna’s Archive site makes references 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 AI models.
A founder of an artificial intelligence company posted on LinkedIn that members of the public could in theory “create their own private free equivalent of Spotify”. He said it could also allow tech companies to “train on contemporary music at scale”.
Copyright has emerged as a key issue between creatives, writers and creatives on one side and tech giants on the other.
Policy Proposals and Responses
Across Britain, creative professionals have protested against a government suggestion to let AI companies utilize copyright-protected work without permission unless the owner opts out. Virtually every respondent to a government call for evidence on the proposal has backed artists’ apprehensions.
A government minister for technology, innovation and development informed parliament this month there was “no clear consensus” on the matter, noting 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.
