A digital rights organization has stated to have harvested millions of songs from the popular streaming service and is getting ready to publish them publicly.
Possible Boost for Artificial Intelligence Development
Observers said the apparent data breach could aid AI companies searching for data to develop their models.
An entity called Anna’s Archive said it had scraped 86 million audio tracks from Spotify and 256 million rows of associated data such as performer and album 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 engaged in unlawful scraping,” stated a company representative.
The Swedish service, which has more than 700 million subscribers worldwide, added that an inquiry into unauthorized access found a third party scraped public metadata and employed questionable methods to circumvent DRM [digital rights management].
Group's Declared 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 known for offering links to pirated books, said in a blog it wanted to create a ‘preservation archive’ for music.
The group asserted the music files represented 99.6% of all music listened to by its listeners and would be distributed via ‘peer-to-peer networks’, a means of exchanging large digital 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 describes its purpose as “safeguarding humanity’s information and culture”.
AI Training and Copyright Battleground
Ed Newton-Rex for protecting artists’ copyright, said the leaked music would probably be used for training AI models.
“Educating models on illegally sourced data is sadly common in the tech sector, so this stolen music is almost certain to end up instructing AI models,” he stated.
The group's website alludes to LibGen, a huge online repository 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 wrote on the professional network that members of the public could in theory “create their own private free equivalent of the service”. He added it could also enable tech companies to “train on modern music at scale”.
Intellectual property law has emerged as a key issue between artists, authors and creatives on one side and AI companies on the other.
Government Proposals and Reactions
In the UK, artists and writers have raised concerns against a ministerial proposal to allow AI companies utilize protected work without consent unless the owner signals. Almost every respondent to a government call for evidence on the proposal has supported artists’ concerns.
The secretary of state for science, innovation and development informed parliament this month there was “no clear consensus” on the matter, adding that ministers would “take the time to get this correct”. The government has committed to make policy proposals on AI and copyright by March 2025.
