An activist group has claimed to have scraped millions of tracks from Spotify and is getting ready to release them online.
Potential Boost for Artificial Intelligence Development
Industry experts said the seeming leak could boost artificial intelligence firms searching for material to develop their models.
A group called Anna’s Archive said it had obtained 86 million music files from Spotify and 256 million entries of metadata such as artist and record names. Spotify, which carries more than 100 million songs, 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,” said a company representative.
The Stockholm-based service, which has more than 700 million users worldwide, added that an investigation into unauthorised access found a external actor collected public metadata and used questionable tactics to circumvent DRM protections.
Archive's Declared Mission and Worries
Spotify does not think the music acquired by Anna’s Archive has been released yet. Anna’s Archive, which is known for providing links to copyright-infringing books, wrote in a blog it wanted to create a ‘preservation archive’ for music.
They claimed the audio files represented 99.6% of all music streamed to by its listeners and would be shared via ‘torrents’, a method of exchanging 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 frames its mission as “safeguarding humanity’s knowledge and culture”.
Model Development and Intellectual Property Debate
A composer and campaigner for protecting artists’ copyright, remarked the leaked music would likely be used for training artificial intelligence systems.
“Educating models on pirated data is unfortunately common in the AI industry, so this accessed music is almost certain to end up training AI models,” he stated.
The group's website alludes to a large online archive, a vast online archive of copyrighted books that has reportedly been used by Meta to develop its AI models.
A founder of an artificial intelligence company wrote on the professional network that members of the public could in principle “build their own private free version of Spotify”. The executive added it could also enable tech companies to “educate models on contemporary music at a large volume”.
Intellectual property law has become a key issue between creatives, writers and creatives on one side and AI companies on the other.
Government Proposals and Responses
In the UK, artists and writers have protested against a ministerial proposal to let AI companies utilize copyright-protected work without permission unless the owner opts out. Virtually every participant to a government call for evidence on the proposal has supported artists’ concerns.
The secretary of state for science, research and technology told parliament this month there was “little consensus” on the issue, adding that ministers would “use the time to get this right”. The government has committed to make policy proposals on AI and copyright by next year.
