A digital rights organization has stated to have harvested a vast number of tracks from Spotify and is getting ready to publish them online.
Potential Boost for Artificial Intelligence Development
Industry experts said the seeming data breach could aid AI companies looking for data to develop their models.
An entity called Anna’s Archive said it had obtained 86 million music files from Spotify and 256 million entries of associated data such as artist and album names. Spotify, which hosts more than 100 million tracks, stated that the leak did not constitute its full catalog.
“We have identified and deactivated the malicious user accounts that engaged in unlawful scraping,” stated a company spokesperson.
The Swedish service, which has more than 700 million users worldwide, further explained that an investigation into unauthorized access found a third party scraped public metadata and used questionable tactics to bypass DRM protections.
Archive's Stated Goal and Worries
The streaming service does not think the music taken by Anna’s Archive has been released yet. Anna’s Archive, which is known for offering links to pirated books, wrote in a blog it wanted to create a ‘historical repository’ for music.
The group asserted the audio files represented 99.6% of all music listened to by its listeners and would be shared via ‘torrents’, a method of exchanging large data files online.
“Of course Spotify doesn’t have all the music in the world, but it’s a great start,” said Anna’s Archive, which describes its mission as “preserving humanity’s information and heritage”.
Model Development and Copyright Battleground
A composer and campaigner for defending artists’ copyright, remarked the leaked 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 highly likely to be used training AI models,” he said.
The group's website alludes to a large online archive, a vast online archive of copyrighted books that has reportedly been used by the parent company of Facebook to train its systems.
The co-founder of an AI startup posted on LinkedIn that members of the public could in principle “build their own personal free equivalent of the service”. The executive said it could also allow tech companies to “train on contemporary music at scale”.
Intellectual property law has become a battleground between creatives, authors and content creators on one side and AI companies on the other.
Government Considerations and Responses
In the UK, creative professionals have protested against a government suggestion to allow AI companies use copyright-protected work without consent unless the owner opts out. Virtually every respondent to a government consultation on the idea has backed artists’ concerns.
The secretary of state for technology, innovation and development told parliament this month there was “no clear consensus” on the issue, adding that ministers would “use the time to get this correct”. The government has pledged to make policy proposals on AI and copyright by March 2025.
