Advocacy Collective Asserts to Have Scraped Millions of Music Tracks from the Streaming Giant
A digital rights group has claimed to have scraped a vast number of songs from Spotify and is getting ready to release them publicly.
Possible Impetus for AI Development
Observers noted the apparent data breach could boost AI companies searching for data to train their models.
An entity called Anna’s Archive reported it had obtained 86 million audio tracks from Spotify and 256 million rows of metadata such as performer and album names. The company, which hosts more than 100 million tracks, stated that the breach did not represent its full inventory.
“We have identified and disabled the nefarious user accounts that were involved in illegal scraping,” said a company spokesperson.
The Swedish company, which has more than 700 million subscribers worldwide, added that an inquiry into unauthorized access found a external actor scraped public metadata and employed questionable methods to bypass DRM protections.
Group's Stated Mission and Concerns
The streaming service does not believe the music acquired by Anna’s Archive has been released yet. Anna’s Archive, which is known for providing links to copyright-infringing books, wrote in a blog it wanted to create a ‘preservation archive’ for music.
The group asserted the music files accounted for 99.6% of all music streamed to by its listeners and would be shared via ‘torrents’, a method of sharing 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 frames its purpose as “preserving humanity’s information and heritage”.
AI Training and Copyright Debate
Ed Newton-Rex for protecting artists’ copyright, remarked the leaked music would probably be used for training artificial intelligence systems.
“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 Anna’s Archive site makes references to a large online archive, a vast online repository of pirated books that has reportedly been used by the parent company of Facebook to train its AI models.
The co-founder of an artificial intelligence company wrote on the professional network that individuals of the public could in principle “create their own private free version of the service”. He said it could also allow tech companies to “train on modern music at scale”.
Intellectual property law has become a battleground between creatives, writers and creatives on one side and tech giants on the other.
Policy Considerations and Reactions
Across Britain, artists and writers have protested against a government proposal to let AI companies utilize protected work without consent unless the rights holder signals. Virtually every respondent to a government consultation on the idea has supported artists’ concerns.
The secretary of state for science, research and technology told parliament this month there was “no clear consensus” on the issue, adding that ministers would “take the time to get this right”. The administration has pledged to make regulatory plans on AI and copyright by next year.
