A digital rights organization has stated to have harvested millions of tracks from the popular streaming service and is preparing to publish them publicly.
Possible Boost for AI Training
Observers noted the seeming leak could aid AI companies looking for material to train their technology.
A group known as Anna’s Archive said it had obtained 86 million audio tracks from Spotify and 256 million entries of metadata such as artist and record names. Spotify, which hosts more than 100 million songs, stated that the breach did not represent its full catalog.
“We have located and disabled the malicious user accounts that were involved in illegal scraping,” said a Spotify spokesperson.
The Swedish service, which has more than 700 million users worldwide, added that an inquiry into unauthorised access found a external actor scraped public metadata and used questionable methods to bypass DRM protections.
Group's Stated Goal and Worries
Spotify does not think the audio acquired by Anna’s Archive has been released yet. Anna’s Archive, which is known for offering links to copyright-infringing books, wrote in a blog it wanted to create a ‘historical repository’ for music.
They claimed the audio files represented 99.6% of all music streamed to by its listeners and would be shared via ‘peer-to-peer networks’, a method of sharing large digital files online.
“Of course the service doesn’t have all the music in the world, but it’s a great beginning,” said Anna’s Archive, which describes its purpose as “preserving humanity’s knowledge and heritage”.
AI Training and Copyright Debate
A composer and campaigner for protecting artists’ copyright, said the leaked music would likely be used for developing artificial intelligence systems.
“Training on pirated data is unfortunately common in the AI industry, so this stolen music is almost certain to end up training AI models,” he stated.
The group's website alludes to a large online archive, a huge online archive of copyrighted books that has allegedly been leveraged by the parent company of Facebook to train its systems.
The co-founder of an artificial intelligence company posted on LinkedIn that members of the public could in theory “create their own personal free equivalent of the service”. He added it could also enable tech companies to “educate models on modern music at a large volume”.
Copyright has emerged as a battleground between creatives, authors and creatives on one side and tech giants on the other.
Government Considerations and Responses
In the UK, artists and writers have raised concerns against a ministerial proposal to let AI companies utilize protected work without consent unless the owner opts out. Virtually every participant to a government call for evidence on the idea has backed artists’ concerns.
The secretary of state for technology, innovation and technology told parliament this month there was “no clear consensus” on the matter, noting that ministers would “use the time to get this right”. The administration has committed to make policy proposals on AI and copyright by next year.
