An activist group has claimed to have harvested millions of tracks from the popular streaming service and is preparing to release them publicly.
Potential Boost for AI Training
Industry experts noted the seeming leak could aid AI companies looking for material to train their models.
An entity called Anna’s Archive said it had obtained 86 million audio tracks from the platform and 256 million rows of metadata such as artist and album names. The company, which hosts more than 100 million tracks, stated that the breach did not represent its entire catalog.
“We have identified and disabled the nefarious user accounts that engaged in illegal scraping,” stated a Spotify spokesperson.
The Swedish service, which has more than 700 million users worldwide, further explained that an investigation into unauthorised access identified a external actor scraped public metadata and used questionable tactics to bypass DRM protections.
Group's Declared Goal and Concerns
The streaming service does not think the audio taken by Anna’s Archive has been made public yet. Anna’s Archive, which is known for providing 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 streamed to by Spotify users and would be shared via ‘torrents’, a means of sharing large digital files online.
“Naturally the service 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
Ed Newton-Rex for protecting artists’ copyright, remarked the breached music would likely be utilized for training AI models.
“Educating models on pirated data is sadly widespread in the tech sector, so this accessed music is highly likely to be used training AI models,” he said.
The Anna’s Archive site makes references to a large online archive, a huge online repository of copyrighted books that has allegedly been used by Meta to develop its AI models.
A founder of an artificial intelligence company wrote on the professional network that individuals of the public could in principle “create their own personal free equivalent of the service”. The executive said it could also allow technology firms to “train on modern music at scale”.
Copyright has become a battleground between artists, authors and content creators on one side and tech giants on the other.
Government Considerations and Reactions
In the UK, creative professionals have protested against a government proposal to let AI companies utilize protected work without permission unless the owner opts out. Almost every participant to a government call for evidence on the proposal has backed artists’ apprehensions.
A government minister for technology, innovation and technology told parliament this month there was “little 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.
