An activist group has stated to have harvested a vast number of songs from Spotify and is getting ready to release them publicly.
Potential Impetus for Artificial Intelligence Training
Industry experts noted the seeming data breach could aid AI companies looking for material to develop their models.
A group known as Anna’s Archive said it had scraped 86 million audio tracks from the platform and 256 million entries of metadata such as performer and album names. Spotify, which carries more than 100 million tracks, confirmed that the breach did not represent its full inventory.
“We have located and disabled the malicious user accounts that engaged in unlawful scraping,” stated a Spotify representative.
The Swedish company, which has more than 700 million users worldwide, added that an inquiry into unauthorized access identified a external actor collected public metadata and employed questionable tactics to bypass DRM [digital rights management].
Archive's Declared 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 providing links to pirated books, wrote in a blog it wanted to create a ‘preservation archive’ for music.
The group claimed the audio files accounted for 99.6% of all music listened to by its listeners and would be shared via ‘peer-to-peer networks’, a method of exchanging large digital files online.
“Naturally Spotify doesn’t have all the music in the world, but it’s a great beginning,” commented Anna’s Archive, which describes its mission as “safeguarding humanity’s information and heritage”.
Model Development and Intellectual Property Debate
A composer and campaigner for protecting artists’ rights, remarked the leaked music would probably be used for training artificial intelligence systems.
“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 a large online archive, a vast online repository of pirated books that has reportedly been leveraged by the parent company of Facebook to train its AI models.
A founder of an artificial intelligence company posted on the professional network that members of the public could in theory “create their own private free equivalent of the service”. The executive added it could also allow technology firms to “train on modern music at a large volume”.
Intellectual property law has emerged as a key issue between artists, authors and content creators on one side and AI companies on the other.
Policy Proposals and Responses
Across Britain, artists and writers have protested against a government proposal to let AI companies use protected work without consent unless the owner signals. Virtually every respondent to a government consultation on the proposal has supported artists’ concerns.
The secretary of state for science, research and technology told parliament this month there was “little consensus” on the issue, noting that ministers would “use the time to get this right”. The government has committed to make regulatory plans on AI and copyright by next year.
