A digital rights group has stated to have harvested millions of songs from the popular streaming service and is getting ready to publish them publicly.
Potential Impetus for AI Training
Industry experts said the seeming leak could boost AI companies searching for data to train their models.
An entity called Anna’s Archive reported it had obtained 86 million audio tracks from the platform and 256 million entries of metadata such as artist and record names. The company, which carries more than 100 million songs, stated that the breach did not constitute its entire inventory.
“We have located and disabled the malicious user accounts that engaged in unlawful scraping,” said a Spotify spokesperson.
The Stockholm-based company, which has more than 700 million subscribers worldwide, added that an inquiry into unauthorized access found a external actor collected public metadata and employed questionable methods to circumvent DRM protections.
Archive's Declared Mission and Worries
The streaming service does not think the audio acquired by Anna’s Archive has been released yet. Anna’s Archive, which is known for offering links to pirated books, wrote in a blog it wanted to create a ‘preservation archive’ for music.
They claimed the music files represented 99.6% of all music listened to by Spotify users and would be distributed via ‘torrents’, a means of sharing large digital files online.
“Naturally the service doesn’t have all the music in the world, but it’s a fantastic beginning,” said Anna’s Archive, which describes its mission as “preserving humanity’s information and culture”.
AI Training and Intellectual Property Battleground
A composer and campaigner for defending artists’ rights, remarked the breached music would likely be used for training artificial intelligence systems.
“Educating models on illegally sourced material is sadly common in the tech sector, so this accessed music is almost certain to end up instructing AI models,” he said.
The Anna’s Archive site alludes to LibGen, a vast online archive of copyrighted books that has allegedly been used by the parent company of Facebook to train its systems.
A founder of an AI startup posted on LinkedIn that members of the public could in theory “create their own private free version of the service”. The executive said it could also allow technology firms to “train on modern music at a large volume”.
Copyright has become a battleground between artists, writers and creatives on one side and AI companies on the other.
Government Proposals and Responses
Across Britain, creative professionals have protested against a ministerial suggestion to let AI companies utilize protected work without consent unless the rights holder opts out. Almost every participant to a government consultation on the idea has supported artists’ apprehensions.
A government minister for science, innovation and development told parliament this month there was “little consensus” on the issue, adding that ministers would “use the time to get this correct”. The administration has pledged to make policy proposals on AI and copyright by next year.
