An activist organization has claimed to have harvested millions of songs from Spotify and is preparing to publish them online.
Possible Boost for AI Training
Observers noted the apparent data breach could aid artificial intelligence firms searching for material to develop their technology.
An entity known as Anna’s Archive said it had scraped 86 million audio tracks from the platform and 256 million entries of associated data such as artist and record names. Spotify, which carries more than 100 million songs, stated that the breach did not constitute its entire inventory.
“We have identified and disabled the nefarious user accounts that engaged in illegal scraping,” said a Spotify spokesperson.
The Stockholm-based company, which has more than 700 million subscribers worldwide, further explained that an inquiry into unauthorized access found a third party scraped public metadata and employed illicit tactics to circumvent DRM protections.
Group's Stated Mission and Concerns
The streaming service does not believe the audio taken by Anna’s Archive has been released yet. Anna’s Archive, which is known for providing links to copyright-infringing books, said in a blog it wanted to create a ‘historical repository’ for music.
The group asserted the audio files accounted for 99.6% of all music streamed to by its listeners and would be shared via ‘torrents’, a method of sharing large digital files online.
“Of course Spotify doesn’t have all the music in the world, but it’s a fantastic start,” commented Anna’s Archive, which describes its mission as “safeguarding humanity’s information and culture”.
Model Development and Intellectual Property Debate
Ed Newton-Rex for defending artists’ rights, remarked the breached music would likely be used for training artificial intelligence systems.
“Training on illegally sourced data is sadly common in the AI industry, so this stolen music is almost certain to end up training AI models,” he stated.
The Anna’s Archive site alludes to a large online archive, a huge online archive of copyrighted books that has allegedly been used by the parent company of Facebook to develop its systems.
The co-founder of an artificial intelligence company posted on LinkedIn that individuals of the public could in principle “create their own private free version of the service”. The executive said it could also enable tech companies to “train on modern music at scale”.
Intellectual property law has emerged as a key issue between artists, writers and creatives on one side and tech giants on the other.
Government Proposals and Responses
In the UK, artists and writers have raised concerns against a ministerial suggestion to allow AI companies use protected work without consent unless the owner signals. Virtually every respondent to a government call for evidence on the proposal has backed artists’ concerns.
A government minister for technology, research and technology told parliament this month there was “no clear consensus” on the issue, adding that ministers would “take the time to get this correct”. The government has committed to make regulatory plans on AI and copyright by next year.
