An activist group has claimed to have harvested a vast number of tracks from Spotify and is preparing to release them online.
Possible Boost for Artificial Intelligence Development
Observers said the apparent leak could boost artificial intelligence firms searching for material to train their models.
A group called Anna’s Archive reported it had scraped 86 million audio tracks from Spotify and 256 million rows of metadata such as performer and record names. Spotify, which carries more than 100 million songs, stated that the leak did not represent its entire catalog.
“We have located and deactivated the malicious user accounts that were involved in unlawful scraping,” stated a Spotify spokesperson.
The Swedish service, which has more than 700 million subscribers worldwide, added that an inquiry into unauthorized access found a third party scraped public metadata and used illicit tactics to bypass DRM [digital rights management].
Group's Declared Goal and Worries
Spotify does not believe the music taken by Anna’s Archive has been made public 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 claimed the audio files accounted for 99.6% of all music streamed to by Spotify users and would be distributed via ‘peer-to-peer networks’, a method of exchanging large digital files online.
“Naturally the service doesn’t have all the music in the world, but it’s a fantastic beginning,” said Anna’s Archive, which describes its mission as “preserving humanity’s information and heritage”.
AI Training and Copyright Debate
A composer and campaigner for defending artists’ rights, said the leaked music would probably be used for training AI models.
“Educating models on pirated data is unfortunately common in the tech sector, so this stolen music is highly likely to end up instructing AI models,” he stated.
The Anna’s Archive site makes references to a large online archive, a vast online repository of copyrighted books that has reportedly been used by the parent company of Facebook to train its systems.
A founder of an AI startup wrote on LinkedIn that individuals of the public could in principle “build their own private free equivalent of Spotify”. The executive added it could also allow tech companies to “train on modern music at scale”.
Intellectual property law has become a battleground between creatives, writers and content creators on one side and AI companies on the other.
Policy Considerations and Reactions
In the UK, artists and writers have protested against a ministerial proposal to let AI companies use protected work without consent unless the owner opts out. Almost every participant to a government call for evidence on the proposal has supported artists’ apprehensions.
The secretary of state for science, research and development informed parliament this month there was “little consensus” on the matter, adding that ministers would “use the time to get this correct”. The government has committed to make policy proposals on AI and copyright by next year.
