An activist group has stated to have scraped a vast number of songs from the popular streaming service and is getting ready to publish them publicly.
Potential Boost for Artificial Intelligence Development
Industry experts noted the apparent leak could aid AI companies searching for material to develop their models.
An entity known as Anna’s Archive reported it had obtained 86 million audio tracks from the platform and 256 million rows of metadata such as performer and album names. Spotify, which hosts more than 100 million tracks, stated that the leak did not represent its full catalog.
“We have located and disabled the nefarious user accounts that were involved in illegal scraping,” stated a company spokesperson.
The Swedish company, which has more than 700 million subscribers worldwide, added that an investigation into unauthorised access found a third party scraped public metadata and used illicit methods to bypass DRM protections.
Archive's Stated Goal and Worries
Spotify does not believe the music taken by Anna’s Archive has been released yet. Anna’s Archive, which is known for providing links to copyright-infringing books, wrote 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 distributed via ‘peer-to-peer networks’, a method of exchanging large data files online.
“Naturally the service doesn’t have all the music in the world, but it’s a fantastic start,” commented Anna’s Archive, which describes its mission as “preserving humanity’s knowledge and culture”.
Model Development and Intellectual Property Battleground
Ed Newton-Rex for defending artists’ copyright, remarked the breached music would likely be utilized for developing AI models.
“Training on illegally sourced data is unfortunately common in the tech sector, so this stolen music is highly likely to be used training AI models,” he stated.
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 train its systems.
The co-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 said it could also enable tech companies to “educate models on modern music at scale”.
Intellectual property law has become a key issue between artists, authors and creatives on one side and AI companies on the other.
Policy Proposals and Reactions
Across Britain, creative professionals have protested against a government suggestion to allow AI companies use copyright-protected work without permission unless the owner opts out. Almost every respondent to a government consultation on the proposal has supported artists’ apprehensions.
A government minister for science, innovation and technology informed parliament this month there was “little consensus” on the matter, noting that ministers would “take the time to get this right”. The government has committed to make regulatory plans on AI and copyright by next year.
