A digital rights group has stated to have harvested millions of songs from Spotify and is preparing to publish them online.
Potential Impetus for Artificial Intelligence Training
Observers noted the apparent data breach could boost AI companies looking for material to develop their technology.
An entity called Anna’s Archive said it had scraped 86 million audio tracks from Spotify and 256 million rows of associated data such as artist and record names. Spotify, which hosts more than 100 million songs, stated that the breach did not constitute its entire catalog.
“We have identified and disabled the nefarious user accounts that were involved in unlawful scraping,” said a company representative.
The Swedish company, which has more than 700 million users worldwide, added that an inquiry into unauthorised access identified a third party scraped public metadata and used illicit methods to circumvent DRM protections.
Group's Stated Mission 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 providing links to copyright-infringing books, wrote in a blog it wanted to create a ‘historical repository’ for music.
The group 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 digital files online.
“Naturally Spotify doesn’t have all the music in the world, but it’s a fantastic start,” said Anna’s Archive, which frames its purpose as “safeguarding humanity’s information and culture”.
AI Training and Intellectual Property Debate
A composer and campaigner for protecting artists’ rights, remarked the breached music would likely be used for developing AI models.
“Training on pirated data is unfortunately common in the AI industry, so this stolen music is highly likely to be used instructing AI models,” he said.
The Anna’s Archive site makes references to LibGen, a huge online archive of pirated books that has reportedly been used by the parent company of Facebook to train its AI models.
The co-founder of an artificial intelligence company wrote on LinkedIn that members of the public could in principle “build their own private free version of the service”. The executive said it could also enable tech companies to “educate models on modern music at scale”.
Intellectual property law has emerged as a key issue between creatives, authors and creatives on one side and tech giants on the other.
Policy Proposals and Responses
In the UK, artists and writers have raised concerns against a ministerial suggestion to let AI companies utilize copyright-protected work without permission unless the rights holder opts out. Virtually every participant to a government call for evidence on the proposal has backed artists’ apprehensions.
The secretary of state for technology, innovation and technology told parliament this month there was “no clear consensus” on the issue, noting that ministers would “take the time to get this right”. The government has pledged to make policy proposals on AI and copyright by March 2025.
