Advocacy Collective Claims to Have Scraped Countless of Music Files from Spotify
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 Artificial Intelligence Development
Industry experts said the apparent leak could boost artificial intelligence firms searching for data to train their models.
A group called Anna’s Archive said it had scraped 86 million audio tracks from the platform and 256 million rows of associated data such as artist and album names. The company, which carries more than 100 million tracks, confirmed that the breach did not represent its entire inventory.
“We have identified and deactivated the nefarious user accounts that engaged in illegal scraping,” said a Spotify spokesperson.
The Stockholm-based company, which has more than 700 million users worldwide, added that an inquiry into unauthorized access found a third party scraped public metadata and employed questionable methods to bypass DRM protections.
Archive's Stated Mission and Worries
Spotify does not think the audio acquired by Anna’s Archive has been made public yet. Anna’s Archive, which is known 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 accounted for 99.6% of all music listened to by Spotify users and would be shared via ‘torrents’, a means of exchanging large data files online.
“Naturally Spotify doesn’t have all the music in the world, but it’s a fantastic beginning,” said Anna’s Archive, which frames its mission as “safeguarding humanity’s information and culture”.
AI Training and Intellectual Property Battleground
A composer and campaigner for defending artists’ rights, remarked the breached music would likely be utilized for developing AI models.
“Educating models on illegally sourced data is sadly common in the tech sector, so this stolen music is highly likely to end up training AI models,” he said.
The group's website alludes to LibGen, a vast online archive of pirated books that has reportedly been leveraged by the parent company of Facebook to develop its systems.
The co-founder of an AI startup wrote on LinkedIn that members of the public could in principle “build their own private free version of the service”. The executive said it could also enable tech companies to “train on contemporary music at scale”.
Intellectual property law has become a battleground between artists, authors and creatives on one side and tech giants on the other.
Government Proposals and Reactions
Across Britain, artists and writers have raised concerns against a ministerial proposal to allow AI companies use copyright-protected work without consent unless the rights holder opts out. Almost every participant to a government consultation on the idea has supported artists’ concerns.
The secretary of state for technology, innovation and technology told parliament this month there was “no clear consensus” on the matter, noting that ministers would “use the time to get this right”. The administration has pledged to make policy proposals on AI and copyright by next year.