An activist organization has stated to have harvested a vast number of songs from the popular streaming service and is preparing to release them publicly.
Potential Boost for AI Training
Observers said the apparent data breach could boost artificial intelligence firms searching for data to develop 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 album names. The company, which hosts more than 100 million songs, stated that the breach did not represent its entire inventory.
“We have located and disabled the nefarious user accounts that were involved in unlawful scraping,” said a company spokesperson.
The Stockholm-based company, which has more than 700 million subscribers worldwide, added that an investigation into unauthorised access identified a external actor collected public metadata and employed illicit methods to circumvent DRM [digital rights management].
Group's Stated Mission and Concerns
Spotify does not believe the audio acquired by Anna’s Archive has been released yet. Anna’s Archive, which is recognized for offering links to pirated books, said in a blog it wanted to create a ‘preservation archive’ for music.
They claimed the music files represented 99.6% of all music streamed to by Spotify users and would be distributed via ‘torrents’, a means of exchanging large digital files online.
“Naturally Spotify 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 heritage”.
AI Training and Intellectual Property Debate
A composer and campaigner for protecting artists’ rights, remarked the breached music would probably be utilized for training artificial intelligence systems.
“Educating models on illegally sourced material is unfortunately widespread in the AI industry, so this accessed music is highly likely to end up instructing AI models,” he stated.
The Anna’s Archive site makes references to LibGen, a vast online repository of copyrighted books that has reportedly been used by the parent company of Facebook to train its systems.
A founder of an AI startup wrote on the professional network that individuals of the public could in principle “build their own private free version of the service”. The executive said it could also allow technology firms to “educate models on contemporary music at scale”.
Intellectual property law has emerged as a battleground between artists, writers and content creators on one side and AI companies on the other.
Government Proposals and Responses
In the UK, artists and writers have protested against a government suggestion to allow AI companies utilize protected work without consent unless the rights holder signals. Almost every respondent to a government call for evidence on the proposal has backed artists’ concerns.
The secretary of state for science, innovation and technology informed parliament this month there was “no clear consensus” on the matter, adding that ministers would “use the time to get this correct”. The government has committed to make regulatory plans on AI and copyright by next year.
