An activist group has stated to have harvested millions of songs from Spotify and is getting ready to release them online.
Possible Impetus for AI Training
Industry experts noted the apparent leak could aid AI companies looking for material to train their technology.
An entity known as Anna’s Archive said it had obtained 86 million music files from Spotify and 256 million rows 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 full inventory.
“We have identified and disabled the malicious user accounts that were involved in illegal scraping,” stated a company spokesperson.
The Stockholm-based company, which has more than 700 million subscribers worldwide, further explained that an investigation into unauthorised access identified a third party scraped public metadata and employed questionable tactics to circumvent DRM [digital rights management].
Archive's Stated Goal and Concerns
The streaming service does not think the music taken by Anna’s Archive has been made public yet. Anna’s Archive, which is recognized for providing links to copyright-infringing books, said in a blog it wanted to create a ‘preservation archive’ for music.
They asserted the music files represented 99.6% of all music streamed to by its listeners and would be distributed via ‘torrents’, a method of sharing large digital files online.
“Of course the service doesn’t have all the music in the world, but it’s a great start,” said Anna’s Archive, which describes its purpose as “preserving humanity’s information and culture”.
AI Training and Intellectual Property Battleground
Ed Newton-Rex for protecting artists’ rights, said the leaked music would likely be used for training AI models.
“Educating models on pirated data is sadly widespread in the AI industry, so this stolen music is almost certain to end up training AI models,” he said.
The group's website alludes to a large online archive, a huge online archive of copyrighted books that has reportedly been leveraged by the parent company of Facebook to develop its systems.
The co-founder of an AI startup posted on the professional network that individuals of the public could in principle “build their own private free equivalent of the service”. The executive added it could also enable technology firms to “train on modern music at scale”.
Intellectual property law has become a key issue between creatives, authors and content creators on one side and AI companies on the other.
Policy Considerations and Reactions
Across Britain, creative professionals have raised concerns against a government proposal to let AI companies use protected work without consent unless the owner signals. Almost every respondent to a government call for evidence on the idea has backed artists’ concerns.
A government minister for technology, research and development told parliament this month there was “no clear consensus” on the issue, adding that ministers would “use the time to get this right”. The administration has committed to make policy proposals on AI and copyright by next year.
