A digital rights group has claimed to have harvested a vast number of tracks from the popular streaming service and is preparing to publish them online.
Possible Impetus for Artificial Intelligence Development
Industry experts said the apparent leak could aid artificial intelligence firms looking for data to develop their technology.
A group called Anna’s Archive said it had obtained 86 million audio tracks from Spotify and 256 million rows of metadata such as artist and record names. Spotify, which hosts more than 100 million tracks, stated that the leak did not represent its entire inventory.
“We have identified and deactivated the malicious user accounts that were involved in unlawful scraping,” stated a Spotify spokesperson.
The Stockholm-based company, which has more than 700 million subscribers worldwide, further explained that an inquiry into unauthorised access identified a third party scraped public metadata and employed questionable methods to circumvent DRM protections.
Archive's Declared Goal and Worries
Spotify does not think the audio taken by Anna’s Archive has been made public yet. Anna’s Archive, which is known for providing links to copyright-infringing books, said in a blog it wanted to create a ‘historical repository’ for music.
They asserted the audio files accounted for 99.6% of all music streamed to by its listeners and would be shared via ‘torrents’, a method of sharing large digital files online.
“Of course Spotify doesn’t have all the music in the world, but it’s a fantastic start,” commented Anna’s Archive, which describes its purpose as “safeguarding humanity’s knowledge and culture”.
AI Training and Intellectual Property Battleground
Ed Newton-Rex for defending artists’ copyright, said the breached music would likely be used for training artificial intelligence systems.
“Training on illegally sourced data is unfortunately widespread in the AI industry, so this accessed music is almost certain to be used instructing AI models,” he said.
The Anna’s Archive site alludes to a large online archive, a huge online archive of copyrighted books that has allegedly 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 equivalent of the service”. He added it could also enable tech companies to “train on contemporary music at scale”.
Intellectual property law has emerged as a key issue between creatives, writers and creatives on one side and AI companies on the other.
Policy Proposals and Reactions
Across Britain, creative professionals have raised concerns against a government proposal to allow AI companies utilize copyright-protected work without permission unless the rights holder opts out. Virtually every respondent to a government call for evidence on the idea has backed artists’ concerns.
A government minister for science, research and development informed parliament this month there was “little consensus” on the matter, noting that ministers would “take the time to get this correct”. The administration has pledged to make policy proposals on AI and copyright by March 2025.
