Advocacy Collective Claims to Have Extracted Countless of Music Files from Spotify
An activist group has claimed to have harvested millions of tracks from Spotify and is getting ready to release them publicly.
Potential Impetus for Artificial Intelligence Training
Industry experts noted the seeming data breach could boost AI companies searching for data to train their technology.
A group known as Anna’s Archive said it had scraped 86 million music files from Spotify and 256 million rows of metadata such as performer and album names. Spotify, which carries more than 100 million tracks, stated that the leak did not represent its full catalog.
“We have located and disabled the nefarious user accounts that engaged in illegal scraping,” stated a company spokesperson.
The Swedish service, which has more than 700 million subscribers worldwide, further explained that an inquiry into unauthorised access found a third party collected public metadata and employed questionable tactics to circumvent DRM [digital rights management].
Group's Stated Goal and Concerns
Spotify does not think the music acquired by Anna’s Archive has been made public yet. Anna’s Archive, which is recognized for offering links to pirated books, wrote 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 Spotify users and would be shared via ‘torrents’, a method of sharing large data files online.
“Naturally 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 knowledge and culture”.
AI Training and Copyright Battleground
A composer and campaigner for defending artists’ copyright, said the leaked music would probably be used for developing AI models.
“Educating models on illegally sourced material is unfortunately widespread in the tech sector, so this stolen music is highly likely to be used training AI models,” he stated.
The group's website makes references to a large online archive, a huge online archive of pirated books that has reportedly been leveraged by the parent company of Facebook to train its AI models.
The co-founder of an AI startup posted on the professional network that individuals of the public could in theory “create their own private free version of the service”. He said it could also allow technology firms to “educate models on modern music at scale”.
Intellectual property law has become a key issue between creatives, authors and creatives on one side and AI companies on the other.
Government Proposals and Responses
Across Britain, creative professionals have protested against a ministerial proposal to allow AI companies use protected work without permission unless the owner opts out. Virtually every respondent to a government call for evidence on the proposal has supported artists’ concerns.
The secretary of state for science, research and technology informed parliament this month there was “no clear consensus” on the issue, noting that ministers would “use the time to get this right”. The administration has pledged to make regulatory plans on AI and copyright by next year.
