A digital rights group has claimed to have scraped a vast number of tracks from the popular streaming service and is getting ready to publish them publicly.
Potential Impetus for AI Development
Observers said the apparent data breach could aid AI companies searching for material to develop their technology.
An entity called Anna’s Archive said it had scraped 86 million music files from the platform and 256 million rows of associated data such as artist and album names. The company, which carries more than 100 million songs, stated that the breach did not constitute its full catalog.
“We have located and disabled the nefarious user accounts that were involved in illegal scraping,” said a company spokesperson.
The Swedish service, which has more than 700 million users worldwide, added that an investigation into unauthorised access identified a external actor collected public metadata and used questionable methods to bypass DRM [digital rights management].
Archive's Declared Goal and Worries
Spotify does not believe the music acquired by Anna’s Archive has been released yet. Anna’s Archive, which is known for providing links to copyright-infringing books, said in a blog it wanted to create a ‘historical repository’ for music.
They claimed the music files represented 99.6% of all music streamed to by its listeners and would be shared via ‘torrents’, a method of sharing large data files online.
“Of course Spotify doesn’t have all the music in the world, but it’s a great start,” said Anna’s Archive, which frames its purpose as “preserving humanity’s information and culture”.
Model Development and Intellectual Property Battleground
A composer and campaigner for defending artists’ copyright, remarked the leaked music would probably be utilized for training artificial intelligence systems.
“Training on illegally sourced data is unfortunately widespread in the AI industry, so this stolen music is highly likely to be used training AI models,” he said.
The Anna’s Archive site alludes to LibGen, a huge online archive of copyrighted books that has reportedly been used by the parent company of Facebook to train its systems.
A founder of an AI startup posted on the professional network that members of the public could in theory “build their own personal free equivalent of the service”. He said it could also enable technology firms to “educate models on contemporary music at scale”.
Intellectual property law has become a battleground between creatives, writers and content creators on one side and AI companies on the other.
Government Proposals and Responses
In the UK, artists and writers have raised concerns against a ministerial proposal to allow AI companies utilize protected work without permission unless the owner opts out. Almost every participant to a government consultation on the idea has backed artists’ concerns.
The secretary of state for technology, innovation and development informed parliament this month there was “no clear consensus” on the matter, noting that ministers would “take the time to get this right”. The administration has committed to make regulatory plans on AI and copyright by next year.
