An activist organization has stated to have harvested millions of songs from the popular streaming service and is preparing to publish them online.
Possible Impetus for AI Training
Observers noted the seeming leak could aid AI companies looking for data to develop their models.
An entity known as Anna’s Archive said it had scraped 86 million music files from the platform and 256 million entries of metadata such as performer and album names. The company, which carries more than 100 million songs, confirmed that the leak did not represent its entire catalog.
“We have identified and disabled the nefarious user accounts that engaged in unlawful scraping,” stated a company representative.
The Stockholm-based company, which has more than 700 million users worldwide, further explained that an investigation into unauthorised access identified a third party scraped public metadata and employed illicit tactics to circumvent DRM [digital rights management].
Group's Stated Mission and Concerns
Spotify does not believe the music taken by Anna’s Archive has been made public 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.
They asserted the audio files accounted for 99.6% of all music listened to by its listeners and would be shared via ‘torrents’, a method of sharing large digital files online.
“Naturally Spotify doesn’t have all the music in the world, but it’s a great beginning,” commented Anna’s Archive, which describes its purpose as “safeguarding humanity’s information and heritage”.
AI Training and Intellectual Property Debate
A composer and campaigner for protecting artists’ copyright, said the breached music would probably be utilized for training AI models.
“Educating models on illegally sourced material is unfortunately widespread in the tech sector, so this stolen music is highly likely to end up training AI models,” he said.
The Anna’s Archive site alludes to a large online archive, a vast online repository of copyrighted books that has reportedly been used by Meta to train its AI models.
The co-founder of an artificial intelligence company wrote on LinkedIn that members of the public could in theory “build their own personal free equivalent of the service”. He said it could also enable tech companies to “educate models on modern music at a large volume”.
Copyright has become a battleground between artists, writers and creatives on one side and AI companies on the other.
Policy Proposals and Reactions
In the UK, artists and writers have protested against a ministerial proposal to let AI companies utilize copyright-protected work without consent unless the rights holder signals. Virtually every participant to a government call for evidence on the proposal has backed artists’ concerns.
A government minister for science, research and technology told parliament this month there was “no clear consensus” on the matter, adding that ministers would “use the time to get this correct”. The government has committed to make regulatory plans on AI and copyright by next year.
