An activist organization has claimed to have harvested millions of songs from Spotify and is getting ready to publish them publicly.
Potential Boost for Artificial Intelligence Training
Observers said the seeming leak could boost artificial intelligence firms looking for data to develop their models.
An entity called Anna’s Archive said it had scraped 86 million audio tracks from the platform and 256 million entries of metadata such as artist and album names. Spotify, which hosts more than 100 million songs, stated that the breach did not represent its entire catalog.
“We have identified and disabled the malicious user accounts that were involved in unlawful scraping,” stated a company representative.
The Swedish service, which has more than 700 million users worldwide, further explained that an inquiry into unauthorized access found a third party collected public metadata and employed questionable methods to circumvent DRM [digital rights management].
Archive's Declared Goal and Worries
Spotify does not think the music taken by Anna’s Archive has been released yet. Anna’s Archive, which is recognized for offering links to pirated books, wrote in a blog it wanted to create a ‘preservation archive’ for music.
They asserted the music files accounted for 99.6% of all music listened to by Spotify users and would be distributed via ‘peer-to-peer networks’, a method of sharing large data files online.
“Of course the service doesn’t have all the music in the world, but it’s a great beginning,” commented Anna’s Archive, which describes its mission as “safeguarding humanity’s knowledge and heritage”.
Model Development and Copyright Battleground
Ed Newton-Rex for protecting artists’ copyright, remarked the leaked music would likely 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 be used 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 Meta to train its systems.
A founder of an artificial intelligence company posted on the professional network that members of the public could in theory “build their own private free version of Spotify”. He added it could also allow tech companies to “educate models on modern music at scale”.
Copyright has emerged as a battleground between artists, authors and content creators on one side and tech giants on the other.
Government Proposals and Responses
In the UK, creative professionals have raised concerns against a government proposal to let AI companies use copyright-protected work without permission unless the rights holder signals. Virtually every respondent to a government call for evidence on the proposal has backed artists’ apprehensions.
The secretary of state 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 correct”. The administration has committed to make regulatory plans on AI and copyright by next year.
