A digital rights group has claimed to have scraped a vast number of songs from Spotify and is preparing to release them online.
Possible Boost for Artificial Intelligence Training
Industry experts said the seeming data breach could aid AI companies searching for material to train their models.
A group called Anna’s Archive said it had scraped 86 million audio tracks from Spotify and 256 million rows of metadata such as artist and record names. Spotify, which carries more than 100 million tracks, stated that the leak did not constitute its entire catalog.
“We have identified and disabled the nefarious user accounts that were involved in unlawful scraping,” stated a company spokesperson.
The Swedish service, which has more than 700 million subscribers worldwide, added that an investigation into unauthorized access identified a third party collected public metadata and used illicit tactics to circumvent DRM protections.
Group's Stated Goal and Concerns
Spotify does not think the music acquired by Anna’s Archive has been made public 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 audio files represented 99.6% of all music streamed to by its listeners and would be distributed via ‘peer-to-peer networks’, a method of exchanging large data files online.
“Naturally the service 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 Copyright Debate
A composer and campaigner for defending artists’ rights, said the breached music would probably be utilized for training AI models.
“Educating models on pirated data is unfortunately widespread in the AI industry, so this accessed music is almost certain to end up instructing AI models,” he stated.
The group's website makes references to LibGen, a huge online archive of copyrighted books that has allegedly been used by the parent company of Facebook to train its systems.
A founder of an artificial intelligence company posted on LinkedIn that members of the public could in principle “build their own private free equivalent of Spotify”. The executive said it could also allow technology firms to “train on contemporary music at scale”.
Copyright has become a battleground between artists, authors and content creators on one side and tech giants on the other.
Government Considerations and Reactions
Across Britain, artists and writers have protested against a government suggestion to let AI companies utilize copyright-protected work without consent unless the rights holder signals. Virtually every respondent to a government consultation on the proposal has supported artists’ concerns.
A government minister for science, research and technology informed 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.
