An activist group has claimed to have harvested a vast number of tracks from Spotify and is preparing to publish them publicly.
Potential Impetus for AI Development
Industry experts said the seeming data breach could boost AI companies looking for material to develop their models.
An entity called Anna’s Archive reported it had obtained 86 million audio tracks from the platform and 256 million rows of metadata such as artist and album names. Spotify, which carries more than 100 million songs, stated that the breach did not constitute its entire inventory.
“We have located and deactivated 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, added that an inquiry into unauthorised access identified a external actor collected public metadata and employed questionable methods to bypass DRM [digital rights management].
Archive's Stated Mission and Worries
Spotify does not think the music taken by Anna’s Archive has been released yet. Anna’s Archive, which is known for offering links to copyright-infringing books, wrote in a blog it wanted to create a ‘preservation archive’ for music.
The group claimed the music files accounted for 99.6% of all music streamed to by Spotify users and would be shared via ‘torrents’, a means of sharing large data files online.
“Of course Spotify doesn’t have all the music in the world, but it’s a fantastic beginning,” said Anna’s Archive, which frames its purpose as “preserving humanity’s information and heritage”.
AI Training and Copyright Battleground
A composer and campaigner for defending artists’ copyright, said the leaked music would probably be utilized for developing artificial intelligence systems.
“Training on pirated data is sadly common in the tech sector, so this stolen music is almost certain to end up instructing AI models,” he stated.
The Anna’s Archive site alludes to a large online archive, a vast online repository of pirated books that has reportedly been used by Meta to train its AI models.
A founder of an AI startup posted on LinkedIn that members of the public could in principle “build their own personal free version of the service”. He added it could also allow tech companies to “train on contemporary music at a large volume”.
Intellectual property law has become a key issue between artists, writers and content creators on one side and tech giants on the other.
Policy Considerations and Reactions
In the UK, artists and writers have raised concerns against a ministerial suggestion to let AI companies utilize protected work without consent unless the rights holder opts out. Virtually every respondent to a government consultation on the proposal has supported artists’ concerns.
A government minister for technology, innovation and development told parliament this month there was “little consensus” on the issue, adding that ministers would “take the time to get this right”. The government has committed to make regulatory plans on AI and copyright by next year.
