A digital rights organization has claimed to have scraped a vast number of tracks from the popular streaming service and is getting ready to release them publicly.
Potential Impetus for Artificial Intelligence Development
Industry experts said the seeming data breach could boost artificial intelligence firms looking for data to develop their models.
A group called Anna’s Archive said it had scraped 86 million music files from Spotify and 256 million rows of associated data such as artist and album names. The company, which carries more than 100 million songs, confirmed that the breach did not constitute its entire catalog.
“We have identified and disabled the nefarious user accounts that were involved in unlawful scraping,” said a Spotify spokesperson.
The Stockholm-based service, which has more than 700 million users worldwide, further explained that an inquiry into unauthorized access found a third party collected public metadata and employed questionable methods to bypass DRM protections.
Archive's Stated Mission and Worries
Spotify does not think the music taken by Anna’s Archive has been made public yet. Anna’s Archive, which is known for offering links to pirated books, said in a blog it wanted to create a ‘historical repository’ for music.
The group claimed the audio files represented 99.6% of all music streamed to by its listeners and would be shared via ‘peer-to-peer networks’, a method of exchanging large data files online.
“Of course Spotify doesn’t have all the music in the world, but it’s a great start,” said Anna’s Archive, which frames its mission as “preserving humanity’s information and culture”.
Model Development and Intellectual Property Debate
A composer and campaigner for defending artists’ rights, said the leaked music would probably be used for developing artificial intelligence systems.
“Training on illegally sourced data is unfortunately widespread in the AI industry, so this stolen music is highly likely to end up instructing AI models,” he said.
The Anna’s Archive site alludes to a large online archive, a huge online repository of pirated books that has reportedly been leveraged by the parent company of Facebook to train its systems.
The co-founder of an artificial intelligence company posted on the professional network that individuals of the public could in theory “build their own private free equivalent of Spotify”. The executive said it could also enable tech companies to “educate models on modern music at scale”.
Copyright has become a battleground between artists, writers and content creators on one side and tech giants on the other.
Government Considerations and Responses
Across Britain, artists and writers have raised concerns against a ministerial proposal to let AI companies utilize copyright-protected work without consent unless the owner opts out. Almost every respondent to a government call for evidence on the idea has supported artists’ concerns.
The secretary of state for technology, research and technology informed 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.
