Advocacy Collective Asserts to Have Extracted Countless of Audio Tracks from Spotify
An activist group has claimed to have harvested millions of tracks from the popular streaming service and is preparing to publish them publicly.
Potential Impetus for AI Development
Industry experts noted the apparent leak could aid AI companies searching for material to train their technology.
An entity called Anna’s Archive said it had scraped 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, confirmed that the breach did not constitute its entire catalog.
“We have located and disabled the malicious user accounts that were involved in unlawful scraping,” said a company representative.
The Stockholm-based company, which has more than 700 million subscribers worldwide, added that an inquiry into unauthorized access found a third party collected public metadata and employed questionable methods to circumvent DRM [digital rights management].
Archive's Stated Goal and Worries
The streaming service does not think the audio taken by Anna’s Archive has been made public yet. Anna’s Archive, which is recognized for providing links to pirated books, said in a blog it wanted to create a ‘historical repository’ for music.
The group claimed the audio files accounted for 99.6% of all music streamed to by its listeners and would be distributed via ‘torrents’, a means of sharing large data files online.
“Naturally Spotify doesn’t have all the music in the world, but it’s a fantastic beginning,” said Anna’s Archive, which describes its purpose as “preserving humanity’s information and heritage”.
Model Development and Intellectual Property Debate
A composer and campaigner for defending artists’ copyright, remarked the breached music would probably be utilized for training AI models.
“Educating models on illegally sourced material is sadly widespread in the tech sector, so this stolen music is highly likely to end up instructing AI models,” he stated.
The group's website alludes to LibGen, a vast online archive of pirated books that has allegedly been leveraged by the parent company of Facebook to develop its AI models.
A founder of an AI startup wrote on LinkedIn that members of the public could in principle “build their own private free version of Spotify”. He said it could also allow technology firms to “train on modern music at scale”.
Intellectual property law has emerged as a battleground between artists, authors and content creators on one side and AI companies on the other.
Policy Considerations and Responses
In the UK, artists and writers have raised concerns against a government suggestion to allow AI companies use protected work without consent unless the rights holder signals. Almost every respondent to a government call for evidence on the idea has supported artists’ apprehensions.
The secretary of state for technology, innovation and development told parliament this month there was “no clear consensus” on the issue, adding that ministers would “take the time to get this right”. The administration has pledged to make policy proposals on AI and copyright by next year.