An activist group has stated to have harvested millions of songs from the popular streaming service and is preparing to publish them online.
Possible Boost for AI Training
Industry experts said the seeming leak could aid artificial intelligence firms searching for data to develop their models.
An entity called Anna’s Archive said it had scraped 86 million music files from the platform and 256 million entries of associated data such as artist and record names. Spotify, which carries more than 100 million songs, confirmed that the breach did not represent its entire catalog.
“We have located and disabled the nefarious user accounts that engaged in unlawful scraping,” said a Spotify spokesperson.
The Swedish company, which has more than 700 million users worldwide, added that an inquiry into unauthorised access found a external actor collected public metadata and employed questionable tactics to bypass DRM [digital rights management].
Archive's Stated Mission and Worries
Spotify does not think the music taken by Anna’s Archive has been made public yet. Anna’s Archive, which is recognized for offering links to copyright-infringing books, said in a blog it wanted to create a ‘historical repository’ for music.
They asserted the audio files accounted for 99.6% of all music listened to by Spotify users and would be shared via ‘torrents’, a method of exchanging large data files online.
“Of course the service doesn’t have all the music in the world, but it’s a great beginning,” said Anna’s Archive, which describes its mission as “safeguarding humanity’s information and culture”.
Model Development and Copyright Debate
A composer and campaigner for protecting artists’ rights, remarked the leaked music would probably be used for training artificial intelligence systems.
“Educating models on pirated material is sadly widespread in the tech sector, so this accessed music is highly likely to be used training AI models,” he said.
The group's website alludes to a large online archive, a huge online archive of copyrighted books that has reportedly been used by the parent company of Facebook to develop its systems.
The co-founder of an AI startup posted on the professional network that members of the public could in principle “create their own private free equivalent of the service”. The executive added it could also allow technology firms to “train on modern music at a large volume”.
Copyright has emerged as a battleground between artists, authors and content creators on one side and AI companies on the other.
Policy Proposals and Reactions
Across Britain, creative professionals have protested against a ministerial suggestion to let AI companies use copyright-protected work without consent unless the owner opts out. Almost every participant to a government consultation on the idea has supported artists’ apprehensions.
The secretary of state for science, innovation and development informed parliament this month there was “little consensus” on the matter, adding that ministers would “use the time to get this correct”. The government has committed to make policy proposals on AI and copyright by next year.
