A digital rights organization has stated to have harvested a vast number of songs from Spotify and is preparing to release them publicly.
Potential Impetus for Artificial Intelligence Development
Industry experts noted the apparent leak could boost artificial intelligence firms searching for material 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 entries of metadata such as performer and album names. The company, which hosts more than 100 million songs, stated that the leak did not constitute its full inventory.
“We have identified and disabled the malicious user accounts that were involved in illegal scraping,” said a company spokesperson.
The Stockholm-based service, which has more than 700 million subscribers worldwide, added that an investigation into unauthorised access found a external actor collected public metadata and used illicit methods to circumvent DRM protections.
Group's Stated Goal and Concerns
The streaming service does not believe the audio taken by Anna’s Archive has been released yet. Anna’s Archive, which is known for offering links to pirated books, said in a blog it wanted to create a ‘preservation archive’ for music.
They claimed the music files accounted for 99.6% of all music streamed to by its listeners and would be distributed via ‘torrents’, a method of sharing large data files online.
“Of course the service doesn’t have all the music in the world, but it’s a great beginning,” said Anna’s Archive, which frames its mission as “safeguarding humanity’s knowledge and culture”.
Model Development and Intellectual Property Battleground
Ed Newton-Rex for protecting artists’ rights, remarked the leaked music would likely be utilized for training artificial intelligence systems.
“Educating models on illegally sourced data is sadly widespread in the AI industry, so this accessed music is highly likely to be used instructing AI models,” he said.
The group's website alludes to a large online archive, a vast online repository of copyrighted books that has reportedly been leveraged by the parent company of Facebook to train its AI models.
A founder of an AI startup posted on LinkedIn that individuals of the public could in principle “build their own private free version of Spotify”. He added it could also enable technology firms to “train on contemporary music at scale”.
Intellectual property law has become a battleground between artists, writers and creatives 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 let AI companies use copyright-protected work without permission unless the rights holder signals. Virtually every participant to a government consultation on the idea has backed artists’ apprehensions.
A government minister for science, innovation and technology informed parliament this month there was “little consensus” on the issue, adding that ministers would “use the time to get this right”. The government has committed to make regulatory plans on AI and copyright by next year.
