An activist group has claimed to have harvested millions of songs from Spotify and is getting ready to release them publicly.
Possible Boost for AI Training
Observers said the apparent leak could boost artificial intelligence firms looking for material to train their models.
An entity called Anna’s Archive reported it had obtained 86 million audio tracks from Spotify and 256 million entries of associated data such as artist and album names. The company, which carries more than 100 million songs, stated that the breach did not constitute its entire inventory.
“We have identified and disabled the nefarious user accounts that were involved in unlawful scraping,” stated a Spotify representative.
The Stockholm-based company, which has more than 700 million subscribers worldwide, further explained that an inquiry into unauthorized access identified a third party scraped public metadata and employed questionable methods to bypass DRM protections.
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 providing links to pirated books, said in a blog it wanted to create a ‘preservation archive’ for music.
They claimed the audio files represented 99.6% of all music listened to by Spotify users and would be shared via ‘peer-to-peer networks’, a means 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 frames its mission as “preserving humanity’s knowledge and culture”.
AI Training and Intellectual Property Debate
A composer and campaigner for protecting artists’ copyright, remarked the breached music would probably be used for training artificial intelligence systems.
“Training on pirated material is unfortunately widespread in the AI industry, so this stolen music is almost certain to be used training AI models,” he said.
The group's website makes references to LibGen, a huge online archive of pirated books that has allegedly been leveraged by the parent company of Facebook to train its AI models.
The co-founder of an artificial intelligence company wrote on the professional network that members 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 modern music at a large volume”.
Copyright has become a key issue between creatives, writers and content creators on one side and tech giants on the other.
Government Considerations and Reactions
Across Britain, creative professionals have raised concerns against a government suggestion to let AI companies use copyright-protected work without consent unless the owner signals. Almost every participant to a government call for evidence on the proposal has backed artists’ concerns.
A government minister for technology, innovation and technology told parliament this month there was “little consensus” on the issue, adding that ministers would “use the time to get this right”. The administration has committed to make regulatory plans on AI and copyright by next year.
