A digital rights group has claimed to have harvested millions of tracks from the popular streaming service and is preparing to publish them online.
Possible Impetus for Artificial Intelligence Training
Industry experts said the seeming leak could aid AI companies looking for material to develop their models.
A group known as Anna’s Archive said it had scraped 86 million audio tracks from Spotify and 256 million entries of metadata such as artist and album names. Spotify, which hosts more than 100 million songs, confirmed that the breach did not constitute its full inventory.
“We have identified and deactivated the nefarious user accounts that were involved in unlawful scraping,” stated a company spokesperson.
The Stockholm-based company, which has more than 700 million users worldwide, added that an inquiry into unauthorized access found a third party collected public metadata and used illicit tactics to bypass DRM [digital rights management].
Archive's Stated Mission and Concerns
The streaming service does not believe the music taken by Anna’s Archive has been released yet. Anna’s Archive, which is recognized for offering links to pirated books, wrote in a blog it wanted to create a ‘historical repository’ for music.
The group claimed the audio files accounted for 99.6% of all music streamed to by its listeners and would be distributed via ‘peer-to-peer networks’, a method of exchanging large data files online.
“Naturally the service doesn’t have all the music in the world, but it’s a fantastic start,” said Anna’s Archive, which describes its purpose as “safeguarding humanity’s information and culture”.
AI Training and Copyright Debate
Ed Newton-Rex for defending artists’ rights, remarked the leaked music would probably be used for training AI models.
“Educating models on pirated material is sadly common in the tech sector, so this stolen music is highly likely to end up training AI models,” he stated.
The Anna’s Archive site alludes to LibGen, a vast online archive of pirated books that has allegedly been leveraged by the parent company of Facebook to train its AI models.
The co-founder of an artificial intelligence company posted on LinkedIn that members of the public could in principle “build their own private free version of Spotify”. He added it could also enable technology firms to “educate models on modern music at a large volume”.
Intellectual property law has emerged as a battleground between artists, authors and creatives on one side and tech giants on the other.
Government Proposals and Reactions
In the UK, artists and writers have raised concerns against a government proposal to allow AI companies use 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 science, innovation and technology told parliament this month there was “little consensus” on the issue, adding that ministers would “use the time to get this correct”. The government has pledged to make regulatory plans on AI and copyright by March 2025.
