An activist group has claimed to have harvested millions of songs from Spotify and is getting ready to release them publicly.
Potential Impetus for AI Development
Observers noted the seeming data breach could boost AI companies looking for data to train their models.
A group known as Anna’s Archive reported it had scraped 86 million audio tracks from Spotify and 256 million rows of metadata such as artist and record names. The company, which carries more than 100 million tracks, confirmed that the breach did not represent its entire inventory.
“We have identified and disabled the nefarious user accounts that were involved in illegal scraping,” stated a Spotify representative.
The Stockholm-based service, which has more than 700 million subscribers worldwide, further explained that an inquiry into unauthorized access found a third party scraped public metadata and used questionable tactics to circumvent DRM protections.
Group's Declared Goal and Worries
Spotify does not think the music acquired by Anna’s Archive has been made public yet. Anna’s Archive, which is known for offering links to copyright-infringing books, wrote in a blog it wanted to create a ‘historical repository’ for music.
They claimed the music files represented 99.6% of all music streamed to by Spotify users and would be shared via ‘torrents’, a means of sharing large data files online.
“Naturally the service doesn’t have all the music in the world, but it’s a great start,” commented Anna’s Archive, which frames its mission as “safeguarding humanity’s information and culture”.
AI Training and Copyright Debate
Ed Newton-Rex for protecting artists’ rights, remarked the breached music would likely be used for training artificial intelligence systems.
“Educating models on pirated material is unfortunately common in the AI industry, so this stolen music is almost certain to be used training AI models,” he stated.
The Anna’s Archive site makes references to a large online archive, a vast online archive of copyrighted books that has allegedly been leveraged by Meta to train its systems.
The co-founder of an artificial intelligence company wrote on the professional network that individuals of the public could in principle “build their own personal free equivalent of the service”. The executive added it could also enable technology firms to “train on contemporary music at scale”.
Intellectual property law has emerged as a battleground between artists, writers and creatives on one side and tech giants on the other.
Government Proposals and Reactions
In the UK, creative professionals have raised concerns against a ministerial proposal to allow AI companies utilize copyright-protected work without consent unless the owner opts out. Virtually every respondent to a government call for evidence on the idea has backed artists’ apprehensions.
A government minister for technology, innovation and development told parliament this month there was “little consensus” on the matter, adding that ministers would “use the time to get this correct”. The administration has committed to make policy proposals on AI and copyright by next year.
