A digital rights group has claimed to have harvested a vast number of songs from the popular streaming service and is preparing to publish them online.
Possible Boost for AI Development
Industry experts noted the seeming leak could aid AI companies looking for data to train their models.
A group known as 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. The company, which carries more than 100 million tracks, stated that the breach did not represent its full catalog.
“We have identified and deactivated the malicious user accounts that were involved in illegal scraping,” said a company representative.
The Stockholm-based service, which has more than 700 million subscribers worldwide, further explained that an investigation 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
The streaming service does not believe the audio acquired by Anna’s Archive has been released yet. Anna’s Archive, which is recognized for providing links to copyright-infringing books, wrote in a blog it wanted to create a ‘historical repository’ for music.
They claimed the music files accounted for 99.6% of all music listened to by Spotify users and would be distributed via ‘torrents’, a means of sharing large data files online.
“Naturally the service doesn’t have all the music in the world, but it’s a fantastic start,” commented Anna’s Archive, which describes its mission as “preserving humanity’s knowledge and heritage”.
Model Development and Copyright Debate
Ed Newton-Rex for defending artists’ copyright, said the leaked music would probably be used for training artificial intelligence systems.
“Training on pirated data is sadly widespread in the tech sector, so this accessed music is almost certain to be used training AI models,” he said.
The group's website alludes to a large online archive, a vast online archive of copyrighted books that has allegedly been leveraged by the parent company of Facebook to train its AI models.
A founder of an artificial intelligence company posted on the professional network that individuals of the public could in principle “build their own private free equivalent of the service”. He added it could also allow technology firms to “educate models on modern music at scale”.
Copyright has emerged as a key issue between creatives, writers and content creators on one side and tech giants on the other.
Policy Considerations and Responses
Across Britain, creative professionals have protested against a government suggestion to allow AI companies utilize protected work without consent unless the owner opts out. Almost every respondent to a government call for evidence on the proposal has supported artists’ concerns.
The secretary of state for science, research and development told parliament this month there was “no clear consensus” on the matter, adding that ministers would “take the time to get this correct”. The government has pledged to make policy proposals on AI and copyright by next year.
