A digital rights group has stated to have harvested a vast number of songs from Spotify and is getting ready to release them publicly.
Potential Boost for AI Development
Industry experts said the apparent leak could aid AI companies searching for data to develop their models.
A group called Anna’s Archive reported it had scraped 86 million music files from the platform and 256 million rows of metadata such as performer and album names. Spotify, which carries more than 100 million songs, confirmed that the breach did not represent its entire inventory.
“We have located and disabled the malicious user accounts that were involved in unlawful scraping,” said a company representative.
The Swedish company, which has more than 700 million users worldwide, further explained that an inquiry into unauthorized access identified a third party collected public metadata and employed illicit tactics to circumvent DRM protections.
Archive's Declared Mission and Concerns
The streaming service does not believe the audio acquired by Anna’s Archive has been made public yet. Anna’s Archive, which is known 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 its listeners and would be distributed via ‘torrents’, a means of sharing large digital files online.
“Of course the service doesn’t have all the music in the world, but it’s a fantastic beginning,” commented Anna’s Archive, which describes its mission as “preserving humanity’s knowledge and culture”.
Model Development and Copyright Debate
A composer and campaigner for protecting artists’ copyright, said the leaked music would probably be used for training artificial intelligence systems.
“Educating models on illegally sourced data is unfortunately widespread in the tech sector, so this accessed music is highly likely to be used training AI models,” he stated.
The group's website 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 systems.
A founder of an AI startup wrote on the professional network that members of the public could in principle “create their own private free equivalent of the service”. He said it could also enable technology firms to “train on modern music at scale”.
Copyright has emerged as a key issue between artists, writers and creatives on one side and tech giants on the other.
Policy Considerations and Responses
Across Britain, artists and writers have protested against a government proposal to let AI companies utilize copyright-protected work without permission unless the rights holder opts out. Almost every respondent to a government consultation on the proposal has supported artists’ concerns.
A government minister 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 right”. The administration has pledged to make policy proposals on AI and copyright by next year.
