Advocacy Collective Asserts to Have Extracted Millions of Music Tracks from Spotify
A digital rights organization has claimed to have harvested millions of songs from Spotify and is preparing to release them online.
Possible Impetus for AI Training
Industry experts noted the apparent data breach could aid artificial intelligence firms looking for material to train their models.
A group known as Anna’s Archive reported it had obtained 86 million music files from the platform and 256 million rows of metadata such as artist and album names. The company, which hosts more than 100 million songs, confirmed that the breach did not represent its full inventory.
“We have located and disabled the nefarious user accounts that were involved in unlawful scraping,” said a company representative.
The Stockholm-based service, which has more than 700 million subscribers worldwide, added that an investigation into unauthorized access found a external actor collected public metadata and employed questionable tactics to bypass DRM protections.
Archive's Declared Goal and Worries
Spotify does not believe the audio acquired by Anna’s Archive has been released yet. Anna’s Archive, which is recognized for offering links to copyright-infringing books, wrote in a blog it wanted to create a ‘preservation archive’ for music.
They asserted the audio files represented 99.6% of all music listened to by its listeners and would be distributed via ‘peer-to-peer networks’, 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 start,” said Anna’s Archive, which frames its purpose as “safeguarding humanity’s knowledge and culture”.
AI Training and Copyright Battleground
Ed Newton-Rex for defending artists’ rights, remarked the breached music would likely be used for training artificial intelligence systems.
“Educating models on illegally sourced material is unfortunately widespread in the AI industry, so this stolen music is almost certain to be used training AI models,” he stated.
The Anna’s Archive site alludes to LibGen, a vast online repository of copyrighted books that has reportedly been leveraged by Meta to develop its systems.
The co-founder of an AI startup wrote on the professional network that individuals of the public could in theory “build their own private free equivalent of the service”. The executive said it could also allow technology firms to “train on modern music at scale”.
Intellectual property law has become a key issue between artists, authors and content creators on one side and tech giants on the other.
Policy Considerations and Responses
In the UK, artists and writers have protested against a government suggestion to allow AI companies utilize protected work without permission unless the rights holder opts out. Almost every participant to a government call for evidence on the idea has supported artists’ apprehensions.
The secretary of state for science, research and development informed parliament this month there was “no clear consensus” on the matter, noting that ministers would “use the time to get this correct”. The government has committed to make policy proposals on AI and copyright by next year.