An activist organization 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
Observers noted the seeming leak could boost AI companies searching for material to train their models.
A group known as Anna’s Archive said it had scraped 86 million audio tracks from Spotify and 256 million rows of associated data such as artist and record names. The company, which carries more than 100 million songs, confirmed that the leak did not represent its full inventory.
“We have located and disabled the nefarious user accounts that were involved in illegal scraping,” stated a company representative.
The Swedish service, which has more than 700 million subscribers worldwide, further explained that an investigation into unauthorized access identified a external actor scraped public metadata and employed illicit methods to circumvent DRM [digital rights management].
Archive's Declared Goal and Concerns
The streaming service does not think the music taken by Anna’s Archive has been released yet. Anna’s Archive, which is known for providing links to pirated books, said in a blog it wanted to create a ‘preservation archive’ for music.
They claimed the audio files represented 99.6% of all music streamed to by its listeners and would be shared via ‘torrents’, a method of exchanging large digital files online.
“Of course the service doesn’t have all the music in the world, but it’s a great beginning,” said Anna’s Archive, which describes its purpose as “preserving humanity’s knowledge and heritage”.
Model Development and Intellectual Property Battleground
Ed Newton-Rex for defending artists’ rights, said the leaked music would likely be utilized for developing artificial intelligence systems.
“Educating models on pirated data is sadly common in the AI industry, so this stolen music is highly likely to end up instructing AI models,” he said.
The Anna’s Archive site alludes to a large online archive, a vast online repository of pirated books that has reportedly been leveraged by the parent company of Facebook to train its AI models.
A founder of an AI startup posted on the professional network that individuals of the public could in theory “build their own personal free equivalent of the service”. He said it could also enable technology firms to “train on contemporary music at a large volume”.
Copyright has become a battleground between artists, writers and creatives on one side and tech giants on the other.
Government Considerations and Reactions
Across Britain, creative professionals have protested against a ministerial proposal to let AI companies use protected work without consent unless the owner signals. Almost every participant to a government call for evidence on the proposal has backed artists’ apprehensions.
The secretary of state for technology, innovation and technology informed parliament this month there was “no clear consensus” on the matter, adding that ministers would “take the time to get this right”. The government has committed to make policy proposals on AI and copyright by next year.
