An activist organization has stated to have harvested a vast number of songs from Spotify and is getting ready to publish them online.
Potential Boost for AI Development
Industry experts noted the seeming data breach could aid AI companies searching for data to train their models.
An entity called Anna’s Archive reported it had obtained 86 million audio tracks from Spotify and 256 million entries of metadata such as artist and album names. Spotify, which carries more than 100 million songs, stated that the breach did not represent its full catalog.
“We have located and disabled the nefarious user accounts that were involved in illegal scraping,” said a Spotify spokesperson.
The Swedish company, which has more than 700 million users worldwide, further explained that an investigation into unauthorised access identified a third party collected public metadata and employed questionable tactics to bypass DRM [digital rights management].
Archive's Stated Goal and Worries
The streaming service does not think the music taken by Anna’s Archive has been released yet. Anna’s Archive, which is recognized for offering links to copyright-infringing 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 streamed to by its listeners and would be distributed via ‘peer-to-peer networks’, a method of sharing large digital files online.
“Naturally the service doesn’t have all the music in the world, but it’s a fantastic beginning,” said Anna’s Archive, which frames its purpose as “preserving humanity’s knowledge and culture”.
Model Development and Copyright Battleground
A composer and campaigner for protecting artists’ rights, remarked the leaked music would probably be utilized for training artificial intelligence systems.
“Educating models on pirated material is unfortunately widespread in the tech sector, so this accessed music is highly likely to end up training AI models,” he said.
The Anna’s Archive site alludes to a large online archive, a huge online repository of copyrighted books that has allegedly been used by Meta to train its systems.
The co-founder of an artificial intelligence company wrote on the professional network that members of the public could in theory “create their own personal free equivalent of Spotify”. The executive added it could also enable tech companies to “train on modern music at a large volume”.
Intellectual property law has emerged as a battleground between artists, authors and content creators on one side and AI companies on the other.
Government Proposals and Responses
In the UK, artists and writers have raised concerns against a ministerial proposal to allow AI companies utilize protected work without permission unless the owner signals. Almost every respondent to a government call for evidence on the proposal has supported artists’ apprehensions.
The secretary of state for science, research and development told parliament this month there was “no clear consensus” on the issue, adding that ministers would “take the time to get this correct”. The government has committed to make policy proposals on AI and copyright by next year.
