An activist organization has claimed to have harvested millions of tracks from Spotify and is preparing to publish them publicly.
Potential Boost for AI Training
Industry experts said the seeming leak could aid AI companies looking for data to develop their technology.
An entity called Anna’s Archive said it had scraped 86 million music files from the platform and 256 million entries of metadata such as artist and album names. The company, which hosts more than 100 million songs, stated that the leak did not constitute its entire inventory.
“We have identified and disabled the nefarious user accounts that engaged in illegal scraping,” said a Spotify spokesperson.
The Stockholm-based service, which has more than 700 million subscribers worldwide, added that an investigation into unauthorized access found a third party scraped public metadata and employed questionable tactics to circumvent DRM protections.
Group's Stated Mission and Worries
Spotify does not think the audio taken by Anna’s Archive has been made public yet. Anna’s Archive, which is recognized for offering links to copyright-infringing books, wrote in a blog it wanted to create a ‘preservation archive’ for music.
The group asserted the audio files represented 99.6% of all music streamed to by Spotify users and would be shared via ‘torrents’, a means of sharing large digital files online.
“Of course Spotify doesn’t have all the music in the world, but it’s a fantastic start,” said Anna’s Archive, which describes its purpose as “safeguarding humanity’s knowledge and culture”.
AI Training and Copyright Battleground
Ed Newton-Rex for defending artists’ copyright, said the leaked music would probably be utilized for training artificial intelligence systems.
“Training on pirated data is sadly common in the tech sector, so this accessed music is almost certain to be used instructing AI models,” he said.
The Anna’s Archive site makes references to a large online archive, a huge online repository of pirated books that has allegedly 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 theory “build their own personal free version of the service”. The executive added it could also allow tech companies to “educate models on contemporary music at scale”.
Intellectual property law has become a key issue between creatives, authors and content creators on one side and AI companies on the other.
Government Proposals and Responses
In the UK, artists and writers have protested against a government suggestion to let AI companies utilize copyright-protected work without permission unless the owner opts out. Virtually every respondent to a government consultation on the proposal has backed artists’ apprehensions.
A government minister for science, research and development told parliament this month there was “little consensus” on the matter, noting that ministers would “take the time to get this correct”. The government has committed to make policy proposals on AI and copyright by next year.
