A digital rights organization has claimed to have harvested millions of tracks from the popular streaming service and is preparing to publish them online.
Possible Boost for Artificial Intelligence Development
Observers said the apparent leak could aid AI companies searching for data to train their models.
An entity known as Anna’s Archive said it had scraped 86 million audio tracks from the platform and 256 million entries of metadata such as artist and record names. The company, which hosts more than 100 million songs, stated that the breach did not constitute its entire catalog.
“We have located and disabled the malicious user accounts that engaged in illegal scraping,” said a company spokesperson.
The Stockholm-based company, which has more than 700 million subscribers worldwide, added that an investigation into unauthorised access identified a third party collected public metadata and used questionable tactics to circumvent DRM protections.
Group's Declared Goal and Concerns
Spotify does not believe the music taken by Anna’s Archive has been released yet. Anna’s Archive, which is known for providing links to copyright-infringing books, wrote in a blog it wanted to create a ‘historical repository’ for music.
The group claimed the audio files represented 99.6% of all music streamed to by its listeners and would be shared via ‘peer-to-peer networks’, a means of sharing large digital files online.
“Naturally the service doesn’t have all the music in the world, but it’s a great beginning,” said 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 likely be utilized for training artificial intelligence systems.
“Educating models on illegally sourced data is sadly common in the tech sector, so this stolen music is almost certain to end up training AI models,” he said.
The Anna’s Archive site makes references to LibGen, a huge online repository of copyrighted books that has allegedly been leveraged by the parent company of Facebook to develop its AI models.
A founder of an artificial intelligence company posted on the professional network that individuals of the public could in principle “create their own private free equivalent of the service”. He said it could also enable tech companies to “train on modern music at scale”.
Intellectual property law has become a battleground between creatives, authors and creatives on one side and AI companies on the other.
Government Proposals and Responses
Across Britain, artists and writers have protested against a government suggestion to allow AI companies use copyright-protected work without consent unless the rights holder opts out. Virtually every respondent to a government call for evidence on the proposal has backed artists’ apprehensions.
The secretary of state for technology, research and development told parliament this month there was “little consensus” on the issue, noting that ministers would “use the time to get this correct”. The government has committed to make regulatory plans on AI and copyright by next year.
