Advocacy Collective Asserts to Have Scraped Millions of Audio Tracks from the Streaming Giant
A digital rights group has stated to have harvested millions of songs from Spotify and is preparing to release them online.
Possible Impetus for Artificial Intelligence Training
Industry experts noted the seeming data breach could aid artificial intelligence firms looking for data to train their models.
An entity known as Anna’s Archive reported it had obtained 86 million audio tracks from Spotify and 256 million rows of metadata such as artist and record names. Spotify, which carries more than 100 million tracks, confirmed that the leak did not represent its full catalog.
“We have located and disabled the nefarious user accounts that were involved in illegal scraping,” stated a company representative.
The Stockholm-based company, which has more than 700 million subscribers worldwide, further explained that an investigation into unauthorised access identified a third party scraped public metadata and used questionable tactics to circumvent DRM [digital rights management].
Group's Declared Goal and Concerns
The streaming service does not believe the audio 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.
They claimed the audio files represented 99.6% of all music streamed to by its listeners and would be distributed via ‘peer-to-peer networks’, a means of sharing large digital files online.
“Of course 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 “safeguarding humanity’s information and heritage”.
AI Training and Intellectual Property Debate
Ed Newton-Rex for protecting artists’ copyright, said the leaked music would likely be utilized for training artificial intelligence systems.
“Educating models on illegally sourced data is sadly widespread in the tech sector, so this accessed music is almost certain to end up training AI models,” he stated.
The Anna’s Archive site alludes to LibGen, a vast online repository of copyrighted books that has reportedly 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 individuals of the public could in principle “build their own private free equivalent of the service”. The executive added it could also allow technology firms to “train on modern music at scale”.
Intellectual property law has emerged as a key issue between artists, authors and creatives on one side and tech giants on the other.
Government Considerations and Reactions
Across Britain, artists and writers have protested against a ministerial proposal to let AI companies use protected work without consent unless the rights holder signals. Almost every respondent to a government call for evidence on the proposal has supported artists’ apprehensions.
The secretary of state for technology, research and development informed parliament this month there was “no clear consensus” on the matter, adding that ministers would “use the time to get this right”. The administration has pledged to make regulatory plans on AI and copyright by next year.
