A digital rights organization has claimed to have harvested millions of songs from Spotify and is preparing to release them online.
Potential Impetus for Artificial Intelligence Development
Industry experts said the seeming data breach could boost AI companies searching for data to develop their models.
An entity known as Anna’s Archive reported it had scraped 86 million audio tracks from the platform and 256 million entries of associated data such as artist and record names. Spotify, which hosts more than 100 million tracks, stated that the breach did not constitute its full inventory.
“We have identified and disabled the nefarious user accounts that engaged in illegal scraping,” said a Spotify representative.
The Stockholm-based service, which has more than 700 million users worldwide, added that an investigation into unauthorised access identified a external actor scraped public metadata and used questionable methods to circumvent DRM protections.
Archive's Stated Goal and Concerns
The streaming service does not think the music acquired by Anna’s Archive has been released yet. Anna’s Archive, which is known for providing links to copyright-infringing books, wrote in a blog it wanted to create a ‘historical repository’ for music.
They asserted the audio files accounted for 99.6% of all music streamed to by Spotify users and would be distributed via ‘torrents’, a means of sharing large data files online.
“Naturally the service doesn’t have all the music in the world, but it’s a great beginning,” commented Anna’s Archive, which frames its purpose as “preserving humanity’s information and culture”.
AI Training and Intellectual Property Battleground
Ed Newton-Rex for protecting artists’ copyright, remarked the breached music would likely be used for training artificial intelligence systems.
“Educating models on pirated data is unfortunately widespread in the tech sector, so this accessed music is highly likely to end up instructing AI models,” he said.
The group's website makes references to a large online archive, a huge online repository of pirated books that has reportedly been leveraged by the parent company of Facebook to train its systems.
The co-founder of an AI startup wrote on the professional network that individuals of the public could in principle “create their own private free equivalent of the service”. The executive added it could also enable technology firms to “train on contemporary music at a large volume”.
Copyright has become a battleground between artists, authors and creatives on one side and tech giants on the other.
Policy Proposals and Reactions
In the UK, artists and writers have protested against a ministerial suggestion to let AI companies use protected work without permission unless the owner opts out. Almost every participant to a government consultation on the idea has supported artists’ apprehensions.
A government minister for science, research and technology told parliament this month there was “no clear consensus” on the matter, adding that ministers would “take the time to get this correct”. The administration has pledged to make policy proposals on AI and copyright by next year.
