An activist organization has stated to have harvested a vast number of songs from Spotify and is preparing to release them online.
Potential Boost for Artificial Intelligence Development
Industry experts noted the seeming leak could aid AI companies looking for data to develop their models.
An entity known as Anna’s Archive said it had scraped 86 million music files from Spotify and 256 million entries of metadata such as performer and record names. Spotify, which carries more than 100 million songs, confirmed that the leak did not constitute its entire inventory.
“We have located and disabled the nefarious user accounts that were involved in unlawful scraping,” said a company representative.
The Stockholm-based service, which has more than 700 million users worldwide, added that an inquiry into unauthorised access identified a external actor collected public metadata and employed illicit tactics to circumvent DRM [digital rights management].
Group's Stated Mission and Concerns
Spotify does not think the music acquired by Anna’s Archive has been made public 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 asserted the audio files accounted for 99.6% of all music streamed to by its listeners and would be shared via ‘torrents’, a means of exchanging large digital files online.
“Naturally Spotify doesn’t have all the music in the world, but it’s a fantastic beginning,” commented Anna’s Archive, which describes its mission as “preserving humanity’s information and culture”.
AI Training and Intellectual Property Debate
Ed Newton-Rex for protecting artists’ copyright, remarked the leaked music would likely be utilized for training AI models.
“Educating models on illegally sourced data is unfortunately common in the tech sector, so this stolen music is almost certain to end up training AI models,” he said.
The group's website makes references to a large online archive, a vast online repository of pirated books that has allegedly been used by the parent company of Facebook to train its AI models.
A founder of an AI startup wrote on LinkedIn that members of the public could in theory “build their own personal free version of the service”. The executive said it could also enable tech companies to “train on modern music at a large volume”.
Copyright has become a key issue between creatives, writers and content creators on one side and AI companies on the other.
Government Proposals and Reactions
In the UK, artists and writers have protested against a government suggestion to let AI companies use copyright-protected work without permission unless the owner signals. Virtually every participant to a government call for evidence on the idea has supported artists’ concerns.
A government minister for science, innovation and technology told parliament this month there was “little consensus” on the matter, noting that ministers would “use the time to get this right”. The administration has pledged to make policy proposals on AI and copyright by next year.
