A digital rights organization has claimed to have harvested millions of tracks from the popular streaming service and is getting ready to publish them online.
Potential Boost for AI Development
Industry experts said the apparent data breach could aid artificial intelligence firms looking for data to develop their models.
An entity 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 album names. The company, which carries more than 100 million tracks, confirmed that the breach did not constitute its entire inventory.
“We have located and disabled the nefarious user accounts that were involved in illegal scraping,” stated a Spotify representative.
The Swedish company, which has more than 700 million subscribers worldwide, further explained that an investigation into unauthorised access identified a external actor scraped public metadata and used illicit methods to circumvent DRM [digital rights management].
Group's Declared Mission and Concerns
The streaming service does not think the audio taken by Anna’s Archive has been released yet. Anna’s Archive, which is known for providing links to pirated books, wrote in a blog it wanted to create a ‘historical repository’ for music.
They asserted the music files accounted for 99.6% of all music listened to by Spotify users and would be distributed via ‘peer-to-peer networks’, a means of sharing large data files online.
“Naturally Spotify doesn’t have all the music in the world, but it’s a great beginning,” said Anna’s Archive, which describes its purpose as “safeguarding humanity’s information and culture”.
AI Training and Copyright Battleground
Ed Newton-Rex for defending artists’ rights, said the breached music would probably be used for developing artificial intelligence systems.
“Educating models on illegally sourced material is sadly widespread in the tech sector, so this stolen music is almost certain to be used training AI models,” he stated.
The group's website alludes to a large online archive, a vast online archive of pirated books that has allegedly been used by Meta to train its systems.
A founder of an artificial intelligence company posted on the professional network that members of the public could in principle “build their own personal free equivalent of Spotify”. The executive added it could also allow tech companies to “train on modern music at scale”.
Copyright has become a battleground between creatives, writers and content creators on one side and AI companies on the other.
Government Considerations and Reactions
Across Britain, creative professionals have protested against a ministerial suggestion to let AI companies use copyright-protected work without permission unless the rights holder opts out. Almost every participant to a government call for evidence on the idea has backed artists’ apprehensions.
A government minister for science, innovation 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 committed to make policy proposals on AI and copyright by next year.
