An activist group has stated to have harvested millions of songs from Spotify and is preparing to release them publicly.
Possible Boost for AI Training
Industry experts said the apparent data breach could aid AI companies searching for material to train their models.
An entity known as Anna’s Archive reported it had obtained 86 million music files from Spotify and 256 million rows of associated data such as artist and album names. The company, which carries more than 100 million tracks, stated that the breach did not represent its full inventory.
“We have identified and deactivated the malicious user accounts that were involved in illegal scraping,” said a Spotify representative.
The Stockholm-based company, which has more than 700 million users worldwide, further explained that an inquiry into unauthorised access identified a external actor scraped public metadata and employed illicit methods to circumvent DRM [digital rights management].
Archive's Declared Mission and Concerns
The streaming service does not believe the audio acquired by Anna’s Archive has been released yet. Anna’s Archive, which is known for offering links to pirated books, said in a blog it wanted to create a ‘historical repository’ for music.
The group asserted the music files accounted for 99.6% of all music listened to by Spotify users and would be shared via ‘peer-to-peer networks’, a means of exchanging large data files online.
“Of course the service doesn’t have all the music in the world, but it’s a fantastic beginning,” said Anna’s Archive, which frames its mission as “preserving humanity’s knowledge and heritage”.
AI Training and Intellectual Property Debate
Ed Newton-Rex for defending artists’ copyright, remarked the breached music would probably be utilized for training artificial intelligence systems.
“Educating models on illegally sourced data is unfortunately common in the tech sector, so this stolen music is almost certain to be used 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 reportedly been used by Meta to develop its AI models.
A founder of an AI startup posted on LinkedIn that members of the public could in principle “create their own private free equivalent of Spotify”. He added it could also enable technology firms to “train on modern music at a large volume”.
Intellectual property law has become a key issue between artists, writers and content creators on one side and AI companies on the other.
Government Considerations and Responses
Across Britain, artists and writers have raised concerns against a ministerial proposal to let AI companies use protected work without permission unless the owner signals. Almost every participant to a government consultation on the idea has supported artists’ concerns.
A government minister for science, innovation and technology informed parliament this month there was “no clear consensus” on the matter, adding that ministers would “use the time to get this correct”. The administration has pledged to make policy proposals on AI and copyright by next year.
