An activist group has claimed to have harvested millions of songs from Spotify and is getting ready to publish them publicly.
Potential Boost for Artificial Intelligence Development
Industry experts said the apparent data breach could aid AI companies looking for data to develop their technology.
A group called Anna’s Archive reported it had scraped 86 million audio tracks from the platform and 256 million rows of metadata such as performer and record names. Spotify, which hosts more than 100 million tracks, confirmed that the breach did not constitute its entire catalog.
“We have located and disabled the nefarious user accounts that engaged in illegal scraping,” stated a Spotify spokesperson.
The Stockholm-based company, which has more than 700 million users worldwide, further explained that an inquiry into unauthorized access identified a third party scraped public metadata and employed illicit methods to circumvent DRM protections.
Group's Stated Mission and Concerns
Spotify does not think the music taken by Anna’s Archive has been made public yet. Anna’s Archive, which is known for providing links to copyright-infringing books, wrote in a blog it wanted to create a ‘preservation archive’ for music.
The group claimed the music files represented 99.6% of all music listened to by Spotify users and would be distributed via ‘torrents’, a means of sharing large digital files online.
“Of course Spotify doesn’t have all the music in the world, but it’s a great beginning,” said Anna’s Archive, which describes its mission as “preserving humanity’s information and heritage”.
Model Development and Copyright Battleground
A composer and campaigner for defending artists’ rights, remarked the breached music would likely be utilized for training artificial intelligence systems.
“Training on pirated material is unfortunately widespread in the tech sector, so this stolen music is almost certain to end up training AI models,” he said.
The Anna’s Archive site makes references to a large online archive, a huge online archive of copyrighted books that has allegedly been leveraged by the parent company of Facebook to develop its AI models.
The co-founder of an artificial intelligence company posted on LinkedIn that members of the public could in principle “build their own personal free version of the service”. He added it could also enable tech companies to “educate models on contemporary music at scale”.
Copyright has become a key issue between creatives, authors and content creators on one side and AI companies on the other.
Policy Proposals and Reactions
In the UK, artists and writers have raised concerns against a government suggestion to allow AI companies use copyright-protected work without permission unless the rights holder opts out. Virtually every participant to a government consultation on the proposal has backed artists’ apprehensions.
A government minister for science, innovation and technology told parliament this month there was “no clear consensus” on the issue, adding that ministers would “use the time to get this correct”. The administration has pledged to make regulatory plans on AI and copyright by next year.
