A digital rights group has claimed to have harvested a vast number of songs from Spotify and is getting ready to publish them online.
Possible Impetus for AI Training
Industry experts said the apparent data breach could aid artificial intelligence firms looking for data to train their models.
An entity known as Anna’s Archive said it had scraped 86 million music files from the platform and 256 million rows of metadata such as performer and album names. Spotify, which hosts more than 100 million songs, stated that the leak did not constitute its full inventory.
“We have located and disabled the malicious user accounts that were involved in unlawful scraping,” said a company representative.
The Swedish company, which has more than 700 million users worldwide, added that an investigation into unauthorised access identified a external actor collected public metadata and employed questionable methods to circumvent DRM [digital rights management].
Archive's Stated Mission and Worries
The streaming service does not believe the audio acquired by Anna’s Archive has been made public yet. Anna’s Archive, which is known for offering links to pirated 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 listened 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,” commented Anna’s Archive, which frames its mission as “preserving humanity’s knowledge and heritage”.
AI Training and Intellectual Property Debate
A composer and campaigner for defending artists’ copyright, remarked the leaked music would likely be used for training artificial intelligence systems.
“Training on illegally sourced material is unfortunately widespread in the AI industry, so this accessed music is highly likely to be used training AI models,” he said.
The Anna’s Archive site alludes to LibGen, a huge online archive of copyrighted books that has allegedly been leveraged by Meta to develop its AI models.
The co-founder of an AI startup posted on LinkedIn that members of the public could in theory “build their own private free version of the service”. The executive added it could also allow technology firms to “educate models on modern music at scale”.
Copyright has become a key issue between creatives, writers and creatives on one side and AI companies on the other.
Policy Proposals and Responses
Across Britain, creative professionals have raised concerns against a ministerial proposal to allow AI companies use copyright-protected work without permission unless the rights holder signals. Almost every participant to a government call for evidence on the proposal has supported artists’ apprehensions.
The secretary of state for technology, innovation and technology told parliament this month there was “little consensus” on the issue, noting that ministers would “use the time to get this right”. The administration has committed to make regulatory plans on AI and copyright by next year.
