A digital rights group has claimed to have scraped millions of tracks from the popular streaming service and is preparing to publish them publicly.
Possible Impetus for AI Development
Industry experts said the seeming leak could boost artificial intelligence firms searching for material to train their models.
A group called Anna’s Archive said it had obtained 86 million music files from the platform and 256 million rows of metadata such as artist and record names. Spotify, which hosts more than 100 million tracks, confirmed that the leak did not represent its full catalog.
“We have identified and disabled the malicious user accounts that were involved in unlawful scraping,” said a Spotify representative.
The Swedish company, which has more than 700 million users worldwide, further explained that an investigation into unauthorized access found a third party collected public metadata and used illicit methods to circumvent DRM [digital rights management].
Archive's Stated Mission and Worries
The streaming service does not believe the audio taken by Anna’s Archive has been made public yet. Anna’s Archive, which is recognized for providing links to pirated books, wrote in a blog it wanted to create a ‘historical repository’ for music.
The group asserted the music files accounted for 99.6% of all music streamed 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 start,” commented Anna’s Archive, which describes its purpose as “safeguarding humanity’s information and culture”.
AI Training and Intellectual Property Battleground
A composer and campaigner for protecting artists’ rights, remarked the breached music would likely be used for training AI models.
“Educating models on illegally sourced data is unfortunately widespread in the tech sector, so this accessed music is almost certain to end up instructing AI models,” he said.
The Anna’s Archive site makes references to LibGen, a huge online repository of pirated books that has reportedly been used by the parent company of Facebook to develop its systems.
The co-founder of an AI startup wrote on LinkedIn that members of the public could in theory “create their own private free equivalent of the service”. He added it could also enable technology firms to “train on modern music at scale”.
Intellectual property law has emerged as a key issue between creatives, authors and creatives on one side and tech giants on the other.
Government Proposals and Reactions
Across Britain, artists and writers have protested against a government proposal to let AI companies utilize protected work without permission unless the rights holder opts out. Virtually every participant to a government call for evidence on the proposal has backed artists’ apprehensions.
The secretary of state for science, research and development told parliament this month there was “no clear consensus” on the issue, adding that ministers would “take the time to get this correct”. The government has committed to make policy proposals on AI and copyright by next year.
