A digital rights group has stated to have harvested a vast number of songs from Spotify and is getting ready to publish them publicly.
Possible Boost for AI Development
Industry experts said the apparent data breach could boost AI companies looking for data to develop their technology.
An entity called Anna’s Archive reported it had obtained 86 million audio tracks from Spotify and 256 million entries of metadata such as artist and record names. The company, which carries more than 100 million songs, 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,” stated a company representative.
The Swedish service, which has more than 700 million users worldwide, added that an investigation into unauthorized access found a external actor collected public metadata and used illicit methods to bypass DRM [digital rights management].
Group's Declared Mission and Concerns
The streaming service does not think the music taken by Anna’s Archive has been made public yet. Anna’s Archive, which is recognized for offering links to pirated books, wrote in a blog it wanted to create a ‘historical repository’ for music.
The group claimed the music files represented 99.6% of all music streamed to by its listeners and would be shared via ‘peer-to-peer networks’, a method of exchanging large digital 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 mission as “preserving humanity’s information and culture”.
AI Training and Intellectual Property Battleground
Ed Newton-Rex for protecting artists’ rights, said the breached music would likely be used for training artificial intelligence systems.
“Training on illegally sourced material is sadly widespread in the tech sector, so this stolen music is highly likely to be used training AI models,” he said.
The group's website makes references to LibGen, a vast online archive of copyrighted books that has allegedly been leveraged by the parent company of Facebook to train its systems.
The co-founder of an artificial intelligence company posted on the professional network that members of the public could in theory “create their own private free equivalent of the service”. The executive added it could also allow technology firms to “educate models on modern music at scale”.
Intellectual property law has become a key issue between artists, authors and creatives on one side and AI companies on the other.
Policy Proposals and Reactions
In the UK, creative professionals have raised concerns against a government proposal to allow AI companies utilize protected work without consent unless the rights holder opts out. Almost every respondent to a government consultation on the proposal has backed artists’ apprehensions.
A government minister for science, innovation and development informed parliament this month there was “no clear consensus” on the issue, adding that ministers would “take the time to get this correct”. The administration has pledged to make policy proposals on AI and copyright by March 2025.
