An activist group has stated to have harvested millions of songs from Spotify and is preparing to publish them online.
Potential Boost for Artificial Intelligence Training
Industry experts said the seeming data breach could boost artificial intelligence firms looking for material to train their models.
A group known as Anna’s Archive reported it had obtained 86 million audio tracks from the platform and 256 million rows of metadata such as artist and record names. Spotify, which hosts more than 100 million songs, confirmed that the leak did not constitute its full inventory.
“We have located and disabled the nefarious user accounts that engaged in illegal scraping,” stated a Spotify spokesperson.
The Swedish company, which has more than 700 million users worldwide, further explained that an investigation into unauthorized access identified a third party collected public metadata and used illicit methods to bypass DRM protections.
Group's Declared Mission and Worries
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 pirated books, wrote in a blog it wanted to create a ‘historical repository’ for music.
The group asserted the music files represented 99.6% of all music streamed to by its listeners and would be shared via ‘peer-to-peer networks’, a means of exchanging large data 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 frames its mission as “safeguarding humanity’s knowledge and culture”.
AI Training and Copyright Battleground
A composer and campaigner for protecting artists’ rights, said the breached music would probably be utilized for training AI models.
“Training on illegally sourced material is unfortunately common in the tech sector, so this stolen music is highly likely to end up training AI models,” he said.
The group's website makes references to a large online archive, a huge online archive of copyrighted books that has allegedly been used by the parent company of Facebook to train its AI models.
The co-founder of an AI startup posted on LinkedIn that individuals of the public could in principle “build their own private free version of Spotify”. He said it could also allow tech companies to “educate models on contemporary music at a large volume”.
Intellectual property law has become a key issue between artists, writers and creatives on one side and AI companies on the other.
Policy Considerations and Reactions
Across Britain, artists and writers have raised concerns against a government suggestion to allow AI companies utilize protected work without consent unless the rights holder signals. Virtually every participant to a government consultation on the proposal has supported artists’ apprehensions.
A government minister for technology, innovation and technology informed parliament this month there was “little consensus” on the issue, noting that ministers would “use the time to get this right”. The administration has pledged to make regulatory plans on AI and copyright by next year.
