Advocacy Group Asserts to Have Scraped Countless of Audio Tracks from the Streaming Giant
A digital rights organization has claimed to have scraped a vast number of songs from the popular streaming service and is preparing to publish them online.
Possible Boost for Artificial Intelligence Training
Industry experts said the apparent leak could aid artificial intelligence firms searching for data to develop their technology.
A group called Anna’s Archive reported it had obtained 86 million audio tracks from Spotify and 256 million entries of associated data such as artist and album names. Spotify, which hosts more than 100 million songs, confirmed that the breach did not represent its entire inventory.
“We have identified and disabled the nefarious user accounts that engaged in unlawful scraping,” said a Spotify representative.
The Stockholm-based company, which has more than 700 million users worldwide, added that an inquiry into unauthorised access found a external actor scraped public metadata and employed questionable tactics to circumvent DRM protections.
Archive's Stated Mission and Worries
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 pirated books, said in a blog it wanted to create a ‘historical repository’ for music.
They asserted the music files accounted for 99.6% of all music listened to by Spotify users and would be distributed via ‘torrents’, a method of exchanging large digital files online.
“Of course the service doesn’t have all the music in the world, but it’s a great start,” commented Anna’s Archive, which describes its mission as “preserving humanity’s knowledge and culture”.
AI Training and Intellectual Property Battleground
Ed Newton-Rex for protecting artists’ rights, remarked the breached music would likely be utilized for developing artificial intelligence systems.
“Training on illegally sourced data is unfortunately common in the AI industry, so this stolen music is almost certain to end up instructing AI models,” he said.
The Anna’s Archive site alludes to a large online archive, a huge online repository of copyrighted books that has allegedly been used by the parent company of Facebook to train its AI models.
The co-founder of an AI startup posted on LinkedIn that individuals of the public could in principle “build their own private free equivalent of Spotify”. The executive added it could also enable tech companies to “educate models on modern music at scale”.
Copyright has become a battleground between creatives, writers and content creators on one side and AI companies on the other.
Government Proposals and Responses
In the UK, artists and writers have raised concerns against a government proposal to allow AI companies use copyright-protected work without permission unless the rights holder signals. Almost every respondent to a government consultation on the proposal has supported artists’ apprehensions.
The secretary of state for technology, innovation and development informed parliament this month there was “no clear consensus” on the matter, adding that ministers would “take the time to get this right”. The government has committed to make policy proposals on AI and copyright by next year.