Advocacy Collective Asserts to Have Extracted Countless of Music Tracks from the Streaming Giant
An activist organization has stated to have harvested a vast number of songs from the popular streaming service and is preparing to publish them publicly.
Potential Boost for Artificial Intelligence Development
Industry experts said the seeming data breach could boost artificial intelligence firms searching for data to train their models.
A group called Anna’s Archive reported it had scraped 86 million audio tracks from Spotify and 256 million rows of metadata such as performer and record names. Spotify, which carries more than 100 million tracks, confirmed that the leak did not constitute its entire catalog.
“We have identified and disabled the malicious user accounts that were involved in illegal scraping,” stated a Spotify representative.
The Stockholm-based service, which has more than 700 million users worldwide, added that an inquiry into unauthorized access found a third party scraped public metadata and employed questionable methods to bypass DRM [digital rights management].
Group's Declared Goal and Worries
The streaming service does not believe the audio taken by Anna’s Archive has been released yet. Anna’s Archive, which is known for offering links to copyright-infringing books, said in a blog it wanted to create a ‘preservation archive’ for music.
The group asserted the music files represented 99.6% of all music listened to by its listeners and would be distributed via ‘torrents’, a means of exchanging large digital files online.
“Of course Spotify doesn’t have all the music in the world, but it’s a fantastic start,” commented Anna’s Archive, which frames its purpose as “preserving humanity’s knowledge and heritage”.
Model Development and Copyright Debate
A composer and campaigner for protecting artists’ rights, remarked the leaked music would probably be used for training artificial intelligence systems.
“Educating models on pirated data is unfortunately common in the tech sector, so this accessed music is highly likely to be used training AI models,” he said.
The Anna’s Archive site alludes to a large online archive, a vast online archive of pirated books that has allegedly been used by the parent company of Facebook to develop its AI models.
A founder of an AI startup wrote on the professional network that individuals of the public could in theory “create their own private free equivalent of Spotify”. He said it could also allow technology firms to “educate models on modern music at a large volume”.
Intellectual property law has emerged as a battleground between artists, authors and content creators on one side and AI companies on the other.
Government Proposals and Reactions
In the UK, artists and writers have protested against a ministerial suggestion to allow AI companies use protected work without consent unless the rights holder opts out. Almost every respondent to a government call for evidence on the idea has backed artists’ concerns.
The secretary of state for science, innovation and technology told parliament this month there was “little consensus” on the matter, noting that ministers would “take the time to get this right”. The administration has pledged to make policy proposals on AI and copyright by next year.
