A digital rights group has stated to have harvested a vast number of songs from Spotify and is getting ready to publish them online.
Possible Boost for Artificial Intelligence Training
Observers noted the apparent data breach could boost artificial intelligence firms searching for material to train their technology.
An entity called Anna’s Archive reported it had obtained 86 million audio tracks from Spotify and 256 million entries of metadata such as artist and album names. Spotify, which carries more than 100 million tracks, confirmed that the leak did not constitute its full catalog.
“We have located and disabled the malicious user accounts that engaged in unlawful scraping,” stated a company representative.
The Stockholm-based service, which has more than 700 million subscribers worldwide, added that an inquiry into unauthorized access identified a external actor scraped public metadata and used illicit methods to bypass DRM protections.
Group's Stated Mission and Worries
The streaming service does not believe the audio acquired by Anna’s Archive has been made public yet. Anna’s Archive, which is recognized for providing links to pirated books, said in a blog it wanted to create a ‘preservation archive’ for music.
The group claimed the music files represented 99.6% of all music listened to by Spotify users and would be shared via ‘torrents’, a method of sharing large digital files online.
“Naturally 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 “preserving humanity’s knowledge and culture”.
AI Training and Intellectual Property Debate
A composer and campaigner for defending artists’ rights, remarked the breached music would probably be used for developing artificial intelligence systems.
“Training on illegally sourced data is sadly common in the tech sector, so this stolen music is almost certain to end up training AI models,” he stated.
The group's website makes references to a large online archive, a huge online archive of copyrighted books that has reportedly been leveraged by Meta to train its systems.
A founder of an artificial intelligence company posted on the professional network that members of the public could in theory “build their own private free version of Spotify”. He added it could also allow tech companies to “train on modern music at scale”.
Copyright has emerged as a key issue between creatives, writers and creatives on one side and tech giants on the other.
Government Proposals and Reactions
In the UK, artists and writers have protested against a government proposal to allow AI companies use copyright-protected work without permission unless the rights holder signals. Almost every respondent to a government consultation on the idea has backed artists’ concerns.
A government minister for technology, research and technology informed parliament this month there was “little consensus” on the issue, noting that ministers would “take the time to get this right”. The government has pledged to make policy proposals on AI and copyright by next year.