A digital rights group has stated to have scraped millions of songs from Spotify and is getting ready to publish them publicly.
Possible Impetus for Artificial Intelligence Development
Industry experts noted the apparent leak could aid AI companies searching for material to train their models.
An entity called Anna’s Archive reported it had obtained 86 million music files from Spotify and 256 million entries of associated data such as artist and album names. Spotify, which carries more than 100 million songs, confirmed that the leak did not represent its entire inventory.
“We have located and disabled the malicious user accounts that were involved in unlawful scraping,” said a Spotify spokesperson.
The Stockholm-based company, which has more than 700 million users worldwide, further explained that an inquiry into unauthorized access found a external actor scraped public metadata and used questionable tactics to bypass DRM protections.
Group's Declared Mission 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 ‘preservation archive’ for music.
They asserted the audio files accounted for 99.6% of all music streamed to by its listeners and would be distributed via ‘torrents’, a means of sharing large data files online.
“Naturally Spotify doesn’t have all the music in the world, but it’s a great beginning,” commented Anna’s Archive, which frames its mission as “safeguarding humanity’s knowledge and culture”.
Model Development and Copyright Battleground
A composer and campaigner for defending artists’ copyright, remarked the breached music would likely be used for developing AI models.
“Training on illegally sourced material is sadly widespread in the tech sector, so this accessed music is almost certain to be used training AI models,” he stated.
The group's website makes references to a large online archive, a huge online archive of copyrighted books that has allegedly been leveraged by Meta to develop its systems.
The co-founder of an artificial intelligence company posted on the professional network that members of the public could in principle “create their own private free equivalent of the service”. He added it could also allow tech companies to “educate models on modern music at a large volume”.
Intellectual property law has emerged as a battleground between artists, writers and creatives on one side and tech giants on the other.
Government Proposals and Responses
In the UK, artists and writers have raised concerns against a ministerial suggestion to let AI companies use protected work without permission unless the rights holder signals. Virtually every respondent to a government call for evidence on the proposal has backed artists’ apprehensions.
The secretary of state for science, research and technology informed parliament this month there was “no clear consensus” on the issue, adding that ministers would “take the time to get this correct”. The government has pledged to make policy proposals on AI and copyright by next year.
