A digital rights group has stated to have scraped a vast number of songs from Spotify and is preparing to publish them online.
Potential Impetus for Artificial Intelligence Development
Industry experts said the apparent data breach could boost artificial intelligence firms looking for material to develop their technology.
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 record names. The company, which carries more than 100 million songs, stated that the breach did not represent its full inventory.
“We have identified and disabled the nefarious user accounts that were involved in unlawful scraping,” said a company spokesperson.
The Stockholm-based service, which has more than 700 million users worldwide, further explained that an investigation into unauthorised access identified a third party scraped public metadata and used questionable methods to bypass DRM [digital rights management].
Group's Stated Goal and Concerns
Spotify does not think the music taken 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.
They asserted the music files represented 99.6% of all music streamed to by Spotify users and would be distributed via ‘peer-to-peer networks’, a means 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 mission as “preserving humanity’s knowledge and culture”.
Model Development and Intellectual Property Battleground
A composer and campaigner for protecting artists’ rights, remarked the leaked music would probably be used for training AI models.
“Educating models on illegally sourced material is sadly widespread in the AI industry, so this stolen music is highly likely to end up training AI models,” he said.
The Anna’s Archive site makes references to a large online archive, a huge online archive of copyrighted books that has reportedly been used by the parent company of Facebook to develop its AI models.
The co-founder of an AI startup wrote on LinkedIn that members of the public could in theory “create their own private free version of Spotify”. He said it could also enable technology firms to “train on modern music at scale”.
Intellectual property law has emerged as a battleground between artists, writers and creatives on one side and tech giants on the other.
Policy Considerations and Responses
In the UK, creative professionals have raised concerns against a government proposal to allow AI companies utilize protected work without consent unless the rights holder opts out. Almost every respondent to a government call for evidence on the proposal has supported artists’ apprehensions.
The secretary of state for science, innovation and development told parliament this month there was “no clear consensus” on the issue, adding that ministers would “use the time to get this correct”. The government has pledged to make policy proposals on AI and copyright by next year.
