An activist group has stated to have harvested millions of songs from Spotify and is preparing to publish them online.
Potential Impetus for Artificial Intelligence Development
Industry experts said the seeming leak could boost AI companies looking for material to develop their models.
A group called Anna’s Archive said it had obtained 86 million music files from the platform and 256 million rows of metadata such as artist and record names. Spotify, which hosts more than 100 million tracks, confirmed that the leak did not constitute its entire catalog.
“We have located and disabled the nefarious user accounts that engaged in unlawful scraping,” said a Spotify representative.
The Swedish service, which has more than 700 million users worldwide, added that an inquiry into unauthorised access identified a external actor scraped public metadata and employed questionable methods to circumvent DRM protections.
Archive's Declared Goal and Worries
Spotify does not believe the music acquired by Anna’s Archive has been made public yet. Anna’s Archive, which is known for offering links to copyright-infringing books, wrote in a blog it wanted to create a ‘historical repository’ for music.
They asserted the audio files represented 99.6% of all music streamed to by Spotify users and would be shared via ‘torrents’, a method of exchanging large data files online.
“Naturally the service doesn’t have all the music in the world, but it’s a great beginning,” commented Anna’s Archive, which frames its purpose as “preserving humanity’s information and heritage”.
AI Training and Copyright Battleground
A composer and campaigner for defending artists’ copyright, remarked the leaked music would probably be utilized for training AI models.
“Educating models on pirated material is sadly widespread in the tech sector, so this accessed music is almost certain to be used training AI models,” he stated.
The Anna’s Archive site makes references to a large online archive, a huge online repository of copyrighted books that has allegedly been leveraged by Meta to train its AI models.
The co-founder of an AI startup posted on the professional network that individuals of the public could in principle “create their own personal free equivalent of the service”. He said it could also allow tech companies to “train on contemporary music at a large volume”.
Copyright has emerged as a key issue between creatives, authors and creatives on one side and tech giants on the other.
Policy Proposals and Reactions
Across Britain, artists and writers have protested against a ministerial proposal to allow AI companies utilize protected work without permission unless the owner opts out. Virtually every respondent to a government consultation on the idea has backed artists’ apprehensions.
A government minister for science, research and technology told 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 pledged to make policy proposals on AI and copyright by next year.
