An activist organization has stated to have scraped a vast number of tracks from the popular streaming service and is preparing to publish them online.
Possible Boost for AI Training
Industry experts noted the seeming leak could aid AI companies looking for material to develop their models.
An entity known as Anna’s Archive reported it had scraped 86 million audio tracks from the platform and 256 million rows of metadata such as artist and album names. Spotify, which hosts more than 100 million songs, confirmed that the breach did not constitute its entire catalog.
“We have identified and disabled the malicious user accounts that were involved in illegal scraping,” said a company spokesperson.
The Stockholm-based service, which has more than 700 million users worldwide, added that an inquiry into unauthorised access found a third party scraped public metadata and used illicit methods to circumvent DRM [digital rights management].
Group's Declared Goal and Worries
Spotify does not think the music taken by Anna’s Archive has been released yet. Anna’s Archive, which is known for offering links to copyright-infringing books, said in a blog it wanted to create a ‘historical repository’ for music.
They claimed the audio files represented 99.6% of all music listened to by Spotify users and would be shared via ‘peer-to-peer networks’, a means of sharing large data files online.
“Of course the service 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 knowledge and heritage”.
Model Development and Copyright Debate
A composer and campaigner for defending artists’ copyright, remarked the breached music would probably be used for training AI models.
“Training on illegally sourced data is unfortunately common in the tech sector, so this stolen music is highly likely to end up instructing AI models,” he stated.
The Anna’s Archive site alludes to a large online archive, a vast online archive of pirated books that has allegedly been leveraged by the parent company of Facebook to develop its AI models.
A founder of an AI startup wrote on LinkedIn that members of the public could in theory “build their own personal free equivalent of the service”. He added it could also allow technology firms to “train on contemporary music at a large volume”.
Copyright has emerged as a battleground between artists, writers and creatives on one side and AI companies on the other.
Policy Considerations and Responses
Across Britain, creative professionals have raised concerns against a ministerial proposal to let AI companies use copyright-protected work without permission unless the rights holder opts out. Virtually every participant to a government call for evidence on the proposal has backed artists’ concerns.
The secretary of state for science, innovation and technology told parliament this month there was “little consensus” on the matter, adding that ministers would “take the time to get this correct”. The government has committed to make policy proposals on AI and copyright by next year.
