An activist group has claimed to have scraped millions of songs from Spotify and is preparing to release them online.
Potential Boost for AI Development
Observers said the apparent leak could aid AI companies looking for data to develop their models.
A group called Anna’s Archive said it had scraped 86 million music files from the platform and 256 million rows of associated data such as performer and album names. The company, which carries more than 100 million songs, stated that the leak did not constitute its entire inventory.
“We have identified and deactivated the malicious user accounts that were involved in illegal scraping,” said a Spotify spokesperson.
The Stockholm-based company, which has more than 700 million subscribers worldwide, further explained that an investigation into unauthorized access identified a external actor scraped public metadata and used questionable tactics to circumvent DRM [digital rights management].
Group's Stated Goal and Concerns
The streaming service does not believe the music taken by Anna’s Archive has been made public yet. Anna’s Archive, which is known 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 represented 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 start,” said Anna’s Archive, which describes its mission as “preserving humanity’s information and heritage”.
Model Development and Intellectual Property Debate
A composer and campaigner for defending artists’ rights, said the leaked music would likely be used for developing artificial intelligence systems.
“Educating models on illegally sourced data is sadly common in the tech sector, so this accessed music is highly likely to end up training AI models,” he said.
The Anna’s Archive site makes references to a large online archive, a huge online archive of copyrighted 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 the service”. The executive added it could also enable tech companies to “educate models on contemporary music at scale”.
Copyright has become a key issue between artists, authors and content creators on one side and AI companies on the other.
Policy Proposals and Responses
In the UK, creative professionals have raised concerns against a ministerial suggestion to allow AI companies utilize copyright-protected work without consent unless the owner opts out. Virtually every respondent to a government consultation on the idea has backed artists’ concerns.
The secretary of state 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 right”. The government has pledged to make policy proposals on AI and copyright by next year.
