A digital rights group has claimed to have harvested millions of songs from Spotify and is preparing to publish them online.
Possible Boost for AI Development
Observers said the apparent leak could boost AI companies searching for material to develop their models.
An entity called Anna’s Archive reported it had obtained 86 million music files from Spotify and 256 million rows of metadata such as artist and album names. The company, which carries more than 100 million songs, confirmed that the leak did not constitute its entire inventory.
“We have identified and disabled the malicious user accounts that engaged in unlawful scraping,” stated a Spotify representative.
The Swedish service, which has more than 700 million subscribers worldwide, added that an inquiry into unauthorized access found a third party scraped public metadata and employed illicit methods to bypass DRM [digital rights management].
Archive's Declared Goal and Worries
The streaming service does not believe the music acquired 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 listened to by Spotify users and would be distributed via ‘torrents’, a means of exchanging large digital files online.
“Of course the service doesn’t have all the music in the world, but it’s a fantastic beginning,” said Anna’s Archive, which describes its mission as “safeguarding humanity’s information and culture”.
Model Development and Intellectual Property Debate
Ed Newton-Rex for protecting artists’ copyright, remarked the leaked music would probably be used for developing artificial intelligence systems.
“Training on illegally sourced material is sadly common in the AI industry, so this stolen music is almost certain to end up instructing AI models,” he stated.
The group's website makes references to a large online archive, a vast online archive of pirated books that has reportedly been leveraged by the parent company of Facebook to train its AI models.
A founder of an artificial intelligence company posted on the professional network that members of the public could in principle “build their own private free version of Spotify”. The executive added it could also enable tech companies to “educate models on modern music at scale”.
Copyright has emerged as a key issue between creatives, writers and content creators on one side and AI companies on the other.
Policy Considerations and Responses
In the UK, creative professionals have protested against a ministerial proposal to allow AI companies use copyright-protected work without permission unless the rights holder opts out. Virtually every participant to a government consultation on the proposal has supported artists’ concerns.
A government minister for technology, research and technology told parliament this month there was “little consensus” on the matter, adding that ministers would “use the time to get this correct”. The government has pledged to make regulatory plans on AI and copyright by next year.
