An activist organization has claimed to have harvested a vast number of tracks from the popular streaming service and is preparing to publish them publicly.
Possible Boost for Artificial Intelligence Development
Observers noted the seeming leak could aid AI companies searching for material to develop their technology.
An entity known as Anna’s Archive reported it had scraped 86 million music files from the platform and 256 million rows of metadata such as artist and record names. Spotify, which carries more than 100 million tracks, confirmed that the leak did not constitute its entire catalog.
“We have identified and deactivated the nefarious user accounts that engaged in illegal scraping,” said a Spotify representative.
The Swedish service, which has more than 700 million users worldwide, further explained that an investigation into unauthorized access identified a external actor collected public metadata and employed questionable tactics to bypass DRM protections.
Group's Stated Goal and Worries
Spotify does not believe the music taken by Anna’s Archive has been released yet. Anna’s Archive, which is recognized for providing links to pirated books, said in a blog it wanted to create a ‘historical repository’ for music.
They claimed the audio 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.
“Naturally 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 Copyright Battleground
A composer and campaigner for protecting artists’ rights, said the breached music would likely be used for developing AI models.
“Educating models on pirated data is unfortunately common in the tech sector, so this accessed music is highly likely to end up training AI models,” he stated.
The group's website alludes to LibGen, a vast online archive of pirated books that has reportedly been used by the parent company of Facebook to train its AI models.
The co-founder of an artificial intelligence company wrote on the professional network that members of the public could in theory “build their own private free equivalent of the service”. He said it could also allow tech companies to “educate models on contemporary music at scale”.
Copyright has emerged as a key issue between artists, authors and creatives on one side and AI companies on the other.
Policy Proposals and Reactions
Across Britain, creative professionals have protested against a ministerial suggestion to allow AI companies use copyright-protected work without consent unless the owner opts out. Almost every respondent to a government consultation on the proposal has backed artists’ apprehensions.
The secretary of state for science, research and technology 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 pledged to make policy proposals on AI and copyright by next year.
