An activist group has stated to have scraped millions of tracks from the popular streaming service and is preparing to release them publicly.
Potential Impetus for Artificial Intelligence Development
Observers noted the seeming leak could aid artificial intelligence firms looking for material to train their technology.
An entity known as Anna’s Archive said it had scraped 86 million music files 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 constitute its entire inventory.
“We have located and deactivated the malicious user accounts that were involved in unlawful scraping,” said a Spotify spokesperson.
The Swedish service, which has more than 700 million users worldwide, added that an investigation into unauthorised access found a third party collected public metadata and employed illicit tactics to bypass DRM protections.
Archive's Declared Mission and Concerns
The streaming service does not think the music acquired by Anna’s Archive has been released yet. Anna’s Archive, which is recognized for providing links to pirated books, said in a blog it wanted to create a ‘historical repository’ for music.
The group claimed the music files represented 99.6% of all music streamed to by its listeners and would be shared via ‘peer-to-peer networks’, a means of sharing large data files online.
“Naturally the service doesn’t have all the music in the world, but it’s a fantastic start,” commented Anna’s Archive, which frames its mission as “preserving humanity’s knowledge and culture”.
AI Training and Intellectual Property Debate
A composer and campaigner for protecting artists’ copyright, said the leaked music would probably be utilized for training artificial intelligence systems.
“Educating models on illegally sourced data is unfortunately widespread in the AI industry, so this stolen music is highly likely to be used training AI models,” he said.
The Anna’s Archive site makes references to a large online archive, a huge online repository of copyrighted books that has reportedly been used by the parent company of Facebook to train its AI models.
The co-founder of an AI startup wrote on LinkedIn that individuals of the public could in principle “build their own personal free version of the service”. The executive said it could also allow technology firms to “educate models on contemporary music at a large volume”.
Intellectual property law has become a battleground between creatives, writers and content creators on one side and tech giants on the other.
Policy Proposals and Responses
Across Britain, artists and writers have protested against a government proposal to allow AI companies use protected work without consent unless the rights holder opts out. Virtually every participant to a government call for evidence on the proposal has backed artists’ apprehensions.
A government minister for science, research and development informed parliament this month there was “little consensus” on the matter, adding that ministers would “take the time to get this correct”. The administration has committed to make policy proposals on AI and copyright by next year.
