A digital rights group has stated to have harvested millions of songs from the popular streaming service and is preparing to release them publicly.
Possible Boost for AI Development
Industry experts said the seeming leak could aid AI companies looking for data to train their models.
A group known as Anna’s Archive reported it had scraped 86 million music files from the platform and 256 million rows of metadata such as artist and record names. The company, which carries more than 100 million tracks, confirmed that the breach did not represent its entire inventory.
“We have identified and disabled the nefarious user accounts that engaged in illegal scraping,” said a company spokesperson.
The Stockholm-based company, which has more than 700 million users worldwide, added that an inquiry into unauthorised access found a external actor scraped public metadata and employed questionable tactics to bypass DRM [digital rights management].
Group's Declared Mission and Worries
The streaming service does not think the audio acquired by Anna’s Archive has been released yet. Anna’s Archive, which is recognized for providing links to copyright-infringing books, said in a blog it wanted to create a ‘preservation archive’ for music.
The group asserted the audio files accounted for 99.6% of all music streamed to by its listeners and would be distributed via ‘torrents’, a method of exchanging 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 describes its purpose as “preserving humanity’s information and heritage”.
Model Development and Copyright Battleground
Ed Newton-Rex for protecting artists’ copyright, remarked the breached music would likely be utilized for training artificial intelligence systems.
“Educating models on pirated material is unfortunately widespread in the tech sector, so this stolen music is almost certain to end up instructing AI models,” he said.
The group's website makes references to LibGen, a huge online repository of pirated books that has allegedly been used by the parent company of Facebook to train its systems.
A founder of an AI startup posted on the professional network that individuals of the public could in principle “create their own personal free version of Spotify”. He said it could also allow technology firms to “educate models on contemporary music at a large volume”.
Copyright has become a battleground between creatives, writers and content creators on one side and AI companies on the other.
Policy Considerations and Reactions
Across Britain, artists and writers have raised concerns against a government suggestion to allow AI companies utilize copyright-protected work without permission unless the rights holder signals. Almost every respondent to a government consultation on the proposal has backed artists’ apprehensions.
A government minister for science, innovation and technology informed parliament this month there was “no clear consensus” on the matter, noting that ministers would “use the time to get this right”. The government has committed to make regulatory plans on AI and copyright by next year.
