A digital rights organization has claimed to have harvested millions of songs from Spotify and is getting ready to publish them online.
Possible Boost for AI Training
Observers said the apparent leak could boost AI companies looking for material to train their technology.
A group called Anna’s Archive said it had scraped 86 million music files from Spotify and 256 million entries of associated data such as artist and record names. Spotify, which carries more than 100 million tracks, stated that the leak did not represent its entire inventory.
“We have located and disabled the nefarious user accounts that engaged in illegal scraping,” stated a company representative.
The Stockholm-based service, which has more than 700 million users worldwide, further explained that an investigation into unauthorized access identified a third party collected public metadata and employed illicit methods to bypass DRM protections.
Group's Declared Mission and Concerns
The streaming service does not believe the music acquired by Anna’s Archive has been made public yet. Anna’s Archive, which is recognized for providing links to pirated books, wrote in a blog it wanted to create a ‘preservation archive’ for music.
The group asserted the audio files represented 99.6% of all music streamed to by Spotify users and would be shared via ‘torrents’, a means of exchanging large data files online.
“Naturally the service doesn’t have all the music in the world, but it’s a fantastic start,” said Anna’s Archive, which describes its mission as “safeguarding humanity’s knowledge and culture”.
Model Development and Copyright Battleground
A composer and campaigner for protecting artists’ copyright, said the breached music would probably be used for training AI models.
“Training on illegally sourced material is unfortunately common in the AI industry, so this accessed music is highly likely to end up instructing AI models,” he said.
The Anna’s Archive site makes references to LibGen, a vast online archive of copyrighted books that has allegedly been used by Meta to train its AI models.
The co-founder of an artificial intelligence company wrote on the professional network that individuals of the public could in theory “create their own personal free equivalent of Spotify”. The executive said it could also allow tech companies to “train on contemporary music at scale”.
Intellectual property law has become a battleground between artists, writers and creatives on one side and AI companies on the other.
Policy Considerations and Reactions
Across Britain, artists and writers have protested against a government suggestion to let AI companies use copyright-protected work without permission unless the rights holder signals. Almost every respondent to a government call for evidence on the proposal has supported artists’ apprehensions.
A government minister for science, research and development told parliament this month there was “little consensus” on the issue, noting that ministers would “take the time to get this right”. The administration has committed to make policy proposals on AI and copyright by next year.
