A digital rights organization has stated to have harvested millions of songs from Spotify and is preparing to publish them online.
Possible Impetus for Artificial Intelligence Training
Observers noted the seeming data breach could boost AI companies searching for material to develop their models.
An entity called Anna’s Archive said it had obtained 86 million music files from Spotify and 256 million entries of metadata such as artist and album names. Spotify, which hosts more than 100 million songs, confirmed that the leak did not constitute its entire catalog.
“We have identified and deactivated the nefarious user accounts that were involved in illegal scraping,” said a company spokesperson.
The Swedish service, which has more than 700 million users worldwide, added that an investigation into unauthorised access identified a third party collected public metadata and employed questionable methods to bypass DRM [digital rights management].
Group's Declared Mission and Concerns
The streaming service does not believe the audio taken by Anna’s Archive has been released yet. Anna’s Archive, which is recognized for offering links to pirated books, said in a blog it wanted to create a ‘preservation archive’ for music.
The group asserted the audio files accounted for 99.6% of all music listened to by Spotify users and would be shared via ‘torrents’, a means of sharing large digital files online.
“Naturally Spotify doesn’t have all the music in the world, but it’s a fantastic start,” said Anna’s Archive, which frames its purpose as “preserving humanity’s information and heritage”.
Model Development and Intellectual Property Battleground
A composer and campaigner for defending artists’ rights, remarked the leaked music would likely be used for training AI models.
“Training on illegally sourced data is sadly common in the tech sector, so this accessed music is highly likely to end up training AI models,” he said.
The group's website alludes to LibGen, a huge online repository of pirated books that has reportedly been used by the parent company of Facebook to train its AI models.
The co-founder of an artificial intelligence company posted on LinkedIn that individuals of the public could in principle “create their own private free version of the service”. He added it could also allow tech companies to “educate models on modern music at a large volume”.
Copyright has become a battleground between artists, writers and creatives on one side and tech giants on the other.
Policy Considerations and Responses
Across Britain, artists and writers have raised concerns against a ministerial proposal to allow AI companies utilize protected work without permission unless the owner opts out. Almost every participant to a government consultation on the idea has backed artists’ apprehensions.
A government minister 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 government has committed to make regulatory plans on AI and copyright by next year.
