A digital rights organization has stated to have harvested a vast number of tracks from Spotify and is preparing to publish them online.
Possible Impetus for AI Development
Industry experts said the seeming data breach could aid artificial intelligence firms searching for data to train their technology.
An entity known as Anna’s Archive said it had scraped 86 million audio tracks from the platform and 256 million rows of associated data such as artist and album names. The company, which carries more than 100 million tracks, confirmed that the leak did not constitute its full catalog.
“We have located and disabled the nefarious user accounts that were involved in unlawful scraping,” stated a company spokesperson.
The Swedish service, which has more than 700 million subscribers worldwide, further explained that an inquiry into unauthorized access identified a external actor scraped public metadata and employed questionable methods to circumvent DRM [digital rights management].
Group's Stated Goal and Concerns
Spotify does not think the music taken by Anna’s Archive has been released 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 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 sharing large data files online.
“Naturally Spotify doesn’t have all the music in the world, but it’s a great start,” said Anna’s Archive, which frames its mission as “preserving humanity’s information and culture”.
Model Development and Copyright Battleground
A composer and campaigner for defending artists’ rights, said the breached music would likely be used for training AI models.
“Educating models on pirated material is sadly widespread in the tech sector, so this stolen music is highly likely to end up instructing AI models,” he stated.
The Anna’s Archive site alludes to LibGen, a huge online archive of pirated books that has reportedly been used by Meta 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 theory “build their own personal free version of the service”. The executive added it could also enable technology firms to “educate models on modern music at scale”.
Copyright has emerged as a battleground between creatives, authors and content creators on one side and tech giants on the other.
Policy Proposals and Responses
In the UK, artists and writers have protested against a ministerial suggestion to allow AI companies use protected work without consent unless the owner signals. Virtually every respondent to a government call for evidence on the proposal has backed artists’ concerns.
The secretary of state for science, research and development told parliament this month there was “no clear consensus” on the matter, noting that ministers would “use the time to get this right”. The administration has pledged to make regulatory plans on AI and copyright by next year.
