A digital rights group has stated to have harvested a vast number of songs from the popular streaming service and is getting ready to publish them online.
Possible Impetus for AI Training
Industry experts noted the seeming data breach could boost artificial intelligence firms searching for material to develop their technology.
An entity called Anna’s Archive reported it had obtained 86 million audio tracks from Spotify and 256 million rows of metadata such as artist and record names. The company, which carries more than 100 million songs, confirmed that the breach did not represent its entire catalog.
“We have identified and disabled the nefarious user accounts that were involved in unlawful scraping,” stated a company spokesperson.
The Swedish company, which has more than 700 million subscribers worldwide, added that an investigation into unauthorised access identified a external actor scraped public metadata and employed questionable tactics to circumvent DRM [digital rights management].
Archive's Stated Goal and Concerns
The streaming service does not believe 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 claimed the audio files accounted for 99.6% of all music listened to by its listeners and would be shared via ‘peer-to-peer networks’, 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 describes its purpose as “preserving humanity’s knowledge and heritage”.
Model Development and Intellectual Property Battleground
Ed Newton-Rex for defending artists’ rights, remarked the leaked music would probably be used for developing artificial intelligence systems.
“Educating models on pirated material is sadly common in the AI industry, so this accessed music is highly likely to be used training AI models,” he stated.
The group's website makes references to LibGen, a huge online repository of pirated books that has reportedly been used by the parent company of Facebook to train its systems.
The co-founder of an AI startup wrote on the professional network that members of the public could in principle “build their own private free equivalent of Spotify”. He added it could also enable tech companies to “train on modern music at scale”.
Copyright has emerged as a battleground between artists, authors and creatives on one side and tech giants on the other.
Policy Proposals and Reactions
Across Britain, creative professionals have raised concerns against a government suggestion to allow AI companies use protected work without consent unless the owner signals. Almost every respondent to a government call for evidence on the idea has backed artists’ apprehensions.
A government minister for science, research and development told parliament this month there was “little consensus” on the issue, noting that ministers would “take the time to get this correct”. The government has committed to make regulatory plans on AI and copyright by next year.
