A digital rights organization has claimed to have harvested millions of tracks from the popular streaming service and is getting ready to publish them publicly.
Possible Boost for AI Training
Observers said the apparent leak could aid AI companies searching for material to develop their technology.
An entity known as Anna’s Archive reported it had obtained 86 million audio tracks from the platform and 256 million rows of associated data such as artist and record names. The company, which hosts more than 100 million tracks, stated that the breach did not represent its entire catalog.
“We have located and disabled the nefarious user accounts that were involved in unlawful scraping,” said a company spokesperson.
The Swedish company, which has more than 700 million users worldwide, added that an inquiry into unauthorized access found a external actor scraped public metadata and employed questionable methods to bypass DRM protections.
Archive's Stated Mission 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, said in a blog it wanted to create a ‘historical repository’ for music.
The group claimed the music files accounted for 99.6% of all music listened to by its listeners and would be shared via ‘peer-to-peer networks’, a means of exchanging large data files online.
“Naturally Spotify doesn’t have all the music in the world, but it’s a fantastic start,” said Anna’s Archive, which describes its mission as “safeguarding humanity’s knowledge and heritage”.
Model Development and Intellectual Property Battleground
A composer and campaigner for defending artists’ copyright, said the breached music would likely be used for developing AI models.
“Training on pirated material is sadly common in the tech sector, so this accessed music is almost certain to be used training AI models,” he said.
The group's website makes references to a large online archive, a vast online archive of copyrighted books that has reportedly been leveraged by the parent company of Facebook to train its AI models.
The co-founder of an AI startup posted on LinkedIn that individuals of the public could in theory “build their own personal free equivalent of the service”. The executive said it could also enable tech companies to “train on modern music at a large volume”.
Intellectual property law has become a battleground between creatives, writers and content creators on one side and tech giants on the other.
Government Considerations and Responses
Across Britain, artists and writers have raised concerns against a government suggestion to let AI companies utilize copyright-protected work without permission unless the rights holder signals. Almost every respondent to a government call for evidence on the proposal has backed artists’ concerns.
A government minister for science, research and development informed parliament this month there was “no clear consensus” on the issue, adding that ministers would “use the time to get this right”. The administration has committed to make policy proposals on AI and copyright by next year.
