An activist organization has claimed to have scraped millions of songs from the popular streaming service and is preparing to publish them online.
Possible Boost for AI Development
Industry experts noted the seeming data breach could aid AI companies searching for data to develop their technology.
An entity known as Anna’s Archive said it had obtained 86 million audio tracks from the platform and 256 million rows of metadata such as performer and record names. The company, which carries more than 100 million tracks, stated that the breach did not constitute its entire inventory.
“We have identified and disabled the malicious user accounts that were involved in unlawful scraping,” stated a company spokesperson.
The Stockholm-based company, which has more than 700 million subscribers worldwide, further explained that an investigation into unauthorised access found a external actor collected public metadata and employed questionable tactics to bypass DRM protections.
Archive's Declared Mission and Worries
The streaming service does not think the music acquired by Anna’s Archive has been released yet. Anna’s Archive, which is known for providing links to pirated books, wrote in a blog it wanted to create a ‘historical repository’ for music.
The group asserted the music files represented 99.6% of all music streamed to by Spotify users and would be shared via ‘torrents’, a means of sharing large digital files online.
“Of course Spotify doesn’t have all the music in the world, but it’s a great beginning,” said Anna’s Archive, which frames its mission as “preserving humanity’s knowledge and culture”.
AI Training and Copyright Battleground
Ed Newton-Rex for protecting artists’ copyright, said the breached music would probably be used for developing artificial intelligence systems.
“Training on illegally sourced data is unfortunately widespread in the AI industry, so this accessed music is almost certain to end up training AI models,” he said.
The Anna’s Archive site makes references to a large online archive, a huge online archive of pirated books that has reportedly been used by Meta to train its AI models.
A founder of an artificial intelligence company wrote on LinkedIn that members of the public could in theory “build their own personal free equivalent of Spotify”. The executive added it could also allow technology firms to “train on contemporary music at a large volume”.
Intellectual property law has emerged as a battleground between artists, authors and content creators on one side and tech giants on the other.
Government Proposals and Responses
In the UK, creative professionals have raised concerns against a government proposal to let AI companies utilize protected work without consent unless the rights holder opts out. Virtually every respondent to a government consultation on the idea has backed artists’ concerns.
A government minister for technology, research and technology told parliament this month there was “little consensus” on the issue, adding that ministers would “use the time to get this correct”. The government has pledged to make policy proposals on AI and copyright by next year.
