An activist organization has stated to have harvested a vast number of songs from the popular streaming service and is preparing to publish them online.
Possible Boost for AI Training
Industry experts noted the apparent leak could boost artificial intelligence firms looking for material to develop their technology.
A group called Anna’s Archive said it had scraped 86 million audio tracks from Spotify and 256 million rows of metadata such as artist and album names. The company, which hosts more than 100 million tracks, confirmed that the breach did not represent its entire catalog.
“We have located and deactivated the nefarious user accounts that engaged in illegal scraping,” stated a Spotify representative.
The Swedish company, which has more than 700 million users worldwide, added that an inquiry into unauthorized access found a third party scraped public metadata and used questionable tactics to bypass DRM protections.
Group's Stated Mission and Concerns
Spotify does not believe the audio taken by Anna’s Archive has been made public yet. Anna’s Archive, which is known for providing links to pirated books, said in a blog it wanted to create a ‘historical repository’ for music.
The group claimed the music files accounted for 99.6% of all music listened to by its listeners and would be distributed via ‘peer-to-peer networks’, a means of sharing large digital files online.
“Naturally the service doesn’t have all the music in the world, but it’s a fantastic start,” said Anna’s Archive, which describes its mission as “preserving humanity’s knowledge and heritage”.
Model Development and Copyright Battleground
Ed Newton-Rex for defending artists’ rights, said the breached music would probably be used for training artificial intelligence systems.
“Educating models on pirated data is unfortunately common in the tech sector, so this stolen music is almost certain to end up training AI models,” he said.
The Anna’s Archive site alludes to LibGen, a huge online repository of pirated books that has allegedly been leveraged by the parent company of Facebook to develop its systems.
The co-founder of an artificial intelligence company posted on LinkedIn that individuals of the public could in principle “create their own private free equivalent of Spotify”. The executive added it could also allow tech companies to “train on modern music at a large volume”.
Copyright has become a key issue between artists, authors and creatives on one side and tech giants on the other.
Government Considerations and Reactions
In the UK, creative professionals have protested against a government suggestion to allow AI companies use protected work without permission unless the rights holder signals. Virtually every participant to a government consultation on the idea has supported artists’ apprehensions.
A government minister for technology, research and technology told parliament this month there was “little consensus” on the issue, noting 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.
