A digital rights group has claimed to have scraped millions of songs from the popular streaming service and is preparing to release them publicly.
Possible Impetus for Artificial Intelligence Development
Industry experts said the seeming leak could aid artificial intelligence firms looking for material to develop their models.
A group called Anna’s Archive said it had scraped 86 million audio tracks from Spotify and 256 million entries of metadata such as performer and album names. The company, which carries more than 100 million songs, stated that the breach did not represent its entire inventory.
“We have identified and disabled the malicious user accounts that engaged in unlawful scraping,” said a company spokesperson.
The Stockholm-based service, which has more than 700 million subscribers worldwide, added that an inquiry into unauthorized access identified a third party collected public metadata and employed questionable methods to circumvent DRM [digital rights management].
Archive's Declared Mission and Concerns
Spotify does not think the music taken by Anna’s Archive has been made public yet. Anna’s Archive, which is recognized for providing 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 Spotify users and would be shared via ‘torrents’, a method of exchanging large digital files online.
“Of course the service doesn’t have all the music in the world, but it’s a great beginning,” commented Anna’s Archive, which frames its purpose as “preserving humanity’s information and culture”.
AI Training and Intellectual Property Debate
Ed Newton-Rex for defending artists’ copyright, said the breached music would probably be used for training artificial intelligence systems.
“Training on pirated data is unfortunately widespread in the AI industry, so this stolen music is almost certain to be used instructing AI models,” he said.
The Anna’s Archive site alludes to LibGen, a vast online archive of copyrighted books that has allegedly been leveraged by the parent company of Facebook to train its AI models.
The co-founder of an AI startup wrote on LinkedIn that individuals of the public could in principle “build their own private free equivalent of Spotify”. He said it could also enable tech companies to “educate models on modern music at scale”.
Copyright has emerged as a battleground between creatives, writers and creatives on one side and tech giants on the other.
Policy Proposals and Reactions
Across Britain, artists and writers have protested against a ministerial proposal to allow AI companies use protected work without consent unless the rights holder signals. Virtually every participant to a government consultation on the proposal has supported artists’ concerns.
A government minister for technology, research and technology informed parliament this month there was “no clear consensus” on the issue, adding that ministers would “use the time to get this right”. The government has committed to make policy proposals on AI and copyright by next year.
