An activist organization has stated to have harvested millions of tracks from the popular streaming service and is preparing to release them online.
Possible Impetus for AI Development
Industry experts said the apparent leak could boost artificial intelligence firms looking for material to develop their technology.
An entity known as Anna’s Archive said it had obtained 86 million audio tracks from the platform and 256 million rows of metadata such as artist and record names. Spotify, which hosts more than 100 million tracks, stated that the leak did not constitute its full catalog.
“We have identified and disabled the malicious user accounts that engaged in illegal scraping,” said 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 bypass DRM protections.
Archive's Stated Mission and Concerns
The streaming service does not believe the audio acquired by Anna’s Archive has been released yet. Anna’s Archive, which is known for offering links to pirated books, wrote in a blog it wanted to create a ‘historical repository’ for music.
The group asserted the music files accounted for 99.6% of all music streamed to by its listeners 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 describes its mission as “preserving humanity’s knowledge and heritage”.
Model Development and Intellectual Property Battleground
Ed Newton-Rex for protecting artists’ copyright, remarked the breached music would likely be used for training AI models.
“Educating models on illegally sourced material is sadly common in the tech sector, so this stolen music is almost certain to end up instructing 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 allegedly been used by the parent company of Facebook to train its systems.
A founder of an artificial intelligence company wrote on LinkedIn that members of the public could in principle “build their own private free equivalent of the service”. The executive added it could also enable technology firms to “educate models on contemporary music at a large volume”.
Copyright has emerged as a battleground between creatives, writers and creatives on one side and AI companies on the other.
Government Proposals and Reactions
In the UK, artists and writers have raised concerns against a government proposal to let AI companies use copyright-protected work without consent unless the owner opts out. Virtually every participant to a government call for evidence on the proposal has backed artists’ apprehensions.
The secretary of state for science, innovation and technology informed parliament this month there was “little consensus” on the issue, adding that ministers would “use the time to get this right”. The administration has committed to make policy proposals on AI and copyright by next year.
