A digital rights organization has claimed to have harvested millions of songs from Spotify and is preparing to release them online.
Potential Impetus for AI Development
Industry experts noted the seeming data breach could aid AI companies looking for material to train their models.
A group called Anna’s Archive said it had scraped 86 million music files from the platform and 256 million entries of associated data such as performer and record names. Spotify, which carries more than 100 million tracks, confirmed that the leak did not represent its entire inventory.
“We have located and disabled the nefarious user accounts that engaged in unlawful scraping,” said a company spokesperson.
The Swedish service, which has more than 700 million users worldwide, added that an investigation into unauthorised access found a third party scraped public metadata and used questionable methods to circumvent DRM [digital rights management].
Group's Stated Goal and Worries
Spotify does not think the audio acquired by Anna’s Archive has been made public yet. Anna’s Archive, which is known for providing links to copyright-infringing books, said in a blog it wanted to create a ‘preservation archive’ for music.
They asserted the music files represented 99.6% of all music streamed to by Spotify users and would be shared via ‘torrents’, a method of sharing large digital files online.
“Naturally the service doesn’t have all the music in the world, but it’s a fantastic start,” commented Anna’s Archive, which describes its mission as “preserving humanity’s knowledge and heritage”.
AI Training and Copyright Debate
Ed Newton-Rex for protecting artists’ rights, said the breached music would probably be utilized for developing artificial intelligence systems.
“Educating models on illegally sourced material is sadly common in the tech sector, so this accessed music is highly likely to be used training AI models,” he said.
The Anna’s Archive site makes references to a large online archive, a huge online repository of copyrighted books that has allegedly been leveraged by the parent company of Facebook to develop its systems.
The co-founder of an AI startup posted on the professional network that members of the public could in principle “create their own personal free equivalent of the service”. The executive said it could also enable tech companies to “train on contemporary music at scale”.
Intellectual property law has become a key issue between creatives, authors and creatives on one side and AI companies on the other.
Policy Proposals and Responses
Across Britain, artists and writers have raised concerns against a ministerial proposal to let AI companies utilize copyright-protected work without consent unless the owner opts out. Virtually every participant to a government call for evidence on the idea has supported artists’ apprehensions.
A government minister for science, research and development informed parliament this month there was “no clear consensus” on the issue, adding that ministers would “take the time to get this correct”. The government has pledged to make regulatory plans on AI and copyright by next year.
