Advocacy Group Claims to Have Extracted Millions of Music Files from the Streaming Giant
An activist group has stated to have harvested a vast number of songs from Spotify and is getting ready to release them online.
Potential Impetus for Artificial Intelligence Training
Industry experts said the apparent leak could aid artificial intelligence firms searching for material to train their models.
An entity known as Anna’s Archive reported it had scraped 86 million music files from Spotify and 256 million rows of metadata such as performer and album names. Spotify, which hosts more than 100 million tracks, stated that the breach did not constitute its entire catalog.
“We have identified and deactivated the malicious user accounts that were involved in illegal scraping,” said a Spotify spokesperson.
The Stockholm-based company, which has more than 700 million subscribers worldwide, added that an inquiry into unauthorised access found a third party collected public metadata and used illicit methods to circumvent DRM [digital rights management].
Group's Stated Goal and Concerns
Spotify does not think the music taken by Anna’s Archive has been released yet. Anna’s Archive, which is recognized for offering links to pirated books, wrote in a blog it wanted to create a ‘preservation archive’ for music.
They claimed the music files represented 99.6% of all music streamed to by Spotify users and would be distributed via ‘torrents’, a means of sharing large data files online.
“Of course the service doesn’t have all the music in the world, but it’s a great beginning,” said Anna’s Archive, which describes its mission as “safeguarding humanity’s knowledge and culture”.
Model Development and Copyright Debate
Ed Newton-Rex for protecting artists’ rights, said the leaked music would likely be used for training AI models.
“Educating models on illegally sourced data is sadly common in the tech sector, so this accessed music is highly likely to end up training AI models,” he stated.
The group's website alludes to LibGen, a huge online repository of pirated books that has allegedly been leveraged by the parent company of Facebook to develop its AI models.
The co-founder of an AI startup wrote on LinkedIn that individuals of the public could in principle “build their own personal free equivalent of the service”. The executive said it could also enable tech companies to “train on contemporary music at scale”.
Intellectual property law has emerged as a battleground between artists, writers and creatives on one side and AI companies on the other.
Government Considerations and Reactions
In the UK, creative professionals have raised concerns against a government suggestion to let AI companies use protected work without consent unless the rights holder signals. Almost every respondent to a government consultation on the idea has backed artists’ concerns.
The secretary of state for science, innovation and development informed parliament this month there was “no clear consensus” on the issue, adding that ministers would “use the time to get this correct”. The government has pledged to make regulatory plans on AI and copyright by next year.