An activist group has claimed to have harvested millions of songs from the popular streaming service and is preparing to release them online.
Potential Impetus for Artificial Intelligence Training
Industry experts said the apparent data breach could aid AI companies searching for material to train their models.
An entity known as Anna’s Archive said it had scraped 86 million music files from Spotify and 256 million entries of metadata such as artist and record names. The company, which hosts more than 100 million songs, stated that the leak did not constitute its entire inventory.
“We have identified and deactivated the malicious user accounts that were involved in unlawful scraping,” said a company spokesperson.
The Swedish company, which has more than 700 million subscribers worldwide, added that an investigation into unauthorized access identified a third party collected public metadata and used illicit methods to bypass DRM protections.
Group's Stated Mission and Worries
Spotify does not believe the music acquired by Anna’s Archive has been made public yet. Anna’s Archive, which is known for offering links to pirated books, wrote in a blog it wanted to create a ‘historical repository’ for music.
The group claimed the audio files represented 99.6% of all music listened to by its listeners and would be shared via ‘peer-to-peer networks’, a method 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 “safeguarding humanity’s information and heritage”.
Model Development and Copyright Debate
A composer and campaigner for protecting artists’ copyright, said the breached music would probably be used for training artificial intelligence systems.
“Training on pirated material is sadly common in the tech sector, so this stolen music is highly likely to end up training AI models,” he said.
The Anna’s Archive site makes references to LibGen, a huge online archive of pirated books that has reportedly been used by the parent company of Facebook to develop its systems.
A founder of an AI startup posted on the professional network that members of the public could in principle “build their own private free equivalent of the service”. The executive added it could also enable technology firms to “educate models on contemporary music at scale”.
Intellectual property law has become a battleground between artists, authors and creatives on one side and AI companies on the other.
Policy Considerations and Responses
In the UK, creative professionals have raised concerns against a ministerial proposal to let AI companies utilize protected work without consent unless the rights holder opts out. Almost every participant to a government call for evidence on the idea has supported artists’ concerns.
The secretary of state for technology, innovation and technology told parliament this month there was “no clear consensus” on the matter, noting that ministers would “use the time to get this right”. The administration has committed to make regulatory plans on AI and copyright by next year.
