Advocacy Group Asserts to Have Extracted Millions of Music Files from Spotify
An activist organization has stated to have harvested millions of songs from Spotify and is preparing to publish them online.
Potential Impetus for AI Training
Industry experts noted the seeming data breach could aid artificial intelligence firms searching for material to develop their models.
A group known as Anna’s Archive reported it had scraped 86 million music files from Spotify and 256 million rows of associated data such as performer and record names. Spotify, which hosts more than 100 million songs, confirmed that the breach did not constitute its entire catalog.
“We have located and disabled the nefarious user accounts that were involved in unlawful scraping,” stated a company representative.
The Swedish service, which has more than 700 million subscribers worldwide, further explained that an investigation into unauthorized access identified a external actor collected public metadata and used questionable methods to circumvent DRM [digital rights management].
Group's Stated Mission and Concerns
The streaming service does not think the music acquired by Anna’s Archive has been released yet. Anna’s Archive, which is recognized for offering links to pirated books, said in a blog it wanted to create a ‘historical repository’ for music.
They claimed the audio files accounted for 99.6% of all music streamed to by Spotify users and would be distributed via ‘peer-to-peer networks’, a means of sharing large digital files online.
“Of course Spotify doesn’t have all the music in the world, but it’s a great beginning,” commented Anna’s Archive, which describes its purpose as “preserving humanity’s information and heritage”.
AI Training and Copyright Debate
Ed Newton-Rex for protecting artists’ rights, said the breached music would likely be used for training artificial intelligence systems.
“Educating models on illegally sourced data is sadly common in the tech sector, so this stolen music is almost certain to be used training AI models,” he stated.
The group's website makes references to a large online archive, a huge online archive of copyrighted books that has reportedly been leveraged by the parent company of Facebook to develop its AI models.
A founder of an artificial intelligence company posted on LinkedIn that members of the public could in principle “build their own private free version of Spotify”. The executive said it could also allow technology firms to “train on contemporary music at scale”.
Copyright has become a battleground between creatives, writers and content creators on one side and tech giants on the other.
Policy Considerations and Reactions
Across Britain, artists and writers have raised concerns against a ministerial suggestion to let AI companies use copyright-protected work without consent unless the owner 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 matter, adding that ministers would “take the time to get this correct”. The government has pledged to make policy proposals on AI and copyright by next year.
