An activist group has claimed to have scraped a vast number of songs from the popular streaming service and is getting ready to publish them online.
Possible Boost for Artificial Intelligence Training
Observers noted the seeming data breach could aid AI companies looking for data to develop their models.
An entity known as Anna’s Archive said it had obtained 86 million music files from the platform 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 leak did not represent its entire inventory.
“We have identified and disabled the malicious user accounts that were involved in illegal scraping,” said a company representative.
The Stockholm-based company, which has more than 700 million users worldwide, further explained that an inquiry into unauthorised access identified a third party scraped public metadata and employed illicit tactics to circumvent DRM protections.
Archive's Stated Goal and Concerns
The streaming service does not believe the music acquired by Anna’s Archive has been released 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.
They claimed the audio files accounted for 99.6% of all music listened to by its listeners and would be distributed via ‘torrents’, a method of exchanging large data files online.
“Naturally Spotify doesn’t have all the music in the world, but it’s a fantastic start,” said Anna’s Archive, which frames its purpose as “preserving humanity’s knowledge and heritage”.
AI Training and Intellectual Property Debate
Ed Newton-Rex for protecting artists’ rights, said the breached music would probably be utilized for developing artificial intelligence systems.
“Educating models on pirated data is unfortunately common in the tech sector, so this accessed music is almost certain to be used training AI models,” he said.
The Anna’s Archive site alludes to a large online archive, a huge online archive of copyrighted books that has reportedly been leveraged by Meta to train its systems.
The co-founder of an AI startup wrote on the professional network that members of the public could in principle “build their own private free equivalent of the service”. The executive added it could also enable tech companies to “educate models on modern music at scale”.
Intellectual property law has become a key issue between artists, authors and content creators on one side and AI companies on the other.
Policy Proposals and Reactions
In the UK, artists and writers have raised concerns against a government proposal to allow AI companies utilize protected work without consent unless the owner signals. Almost every participant to a government consultation on the idea has backed artists’ concerns.
A government minister for science, research and technology told parliament this month there was “no clear consensus” on the matter, noting that ministers would “use the time to get this correct”. The administration has pledged to make policy proposals on AI and copyright by next year.
