A digital rights organization has claimed to have scraped a vast number of songs from Spotify and is preparing to publish them online.
Possible Impetus for Artificial Intelligence Training
Industry experts said the apparent data breach could aid artificial intelligence firms searching for data to train their models.
An entity known as Anna’s Archive said it had obtained 86 million audio tracks from the platform and 256 million rows of metadata such as artist and album names. The company, which hosts more than 100 million tracks, confirmed that the breach did not represent its full inventory.
“We have identified and deactivated the nefarious user accounts that engaged in illegal scraping,” said a company spokesperson.
The Swedish company, which has more than 700 million users worldwide, added that an inquiry into unauthorized access identified a third party collected public metadata and used questionable methods to bypass DRM [digital rights management].
Group's Declared Mission and Concerns
Spotify does not believe the music taken by Anna’s Archive has been released yet. Anna’s Archive, which is known for providing links to copyright-infringing books, said in a blog it wanted to create a ‘historical repository’ for music.
They claimed the music files accounted for 99.6% of all music streamed to by its listeners and would be distributed via ‘peer-to-peer networks’, a method of sharing large data files online.
“Naturally the service doesn’t have all the music in the world, but it’s a great start,” commented Anna’s Archive, which frames its mission as “preserving humanity’s information and heritage”.
AI Training and Copyright Battleground
Ed Newton-Rex for protecting artists’ rights, said the breached music would likely be used for training AI models.
“Educating models on illegally sourced data is sadly widespread in the tech sector, so this accessed music is almost certain to end up instructing AI models,” he stated.
The group's website makes references to LibGen, a huge online repository of pirated books that has allegedly been leveraged by the parent company of Facebook to train its systems.
The co-founder of an artificial intelligence company wrote on LinkedIn that individuals of the public could in principle “create their own personal free equivalent of Spotify”. The executive added it could also enable technology firms to “educate models on contemporary music at scale”.
Intellectual property law has emerged as a battleground between creatives, authors and creatives on one side and AI companies on the other.
Government Considerations and Reactions
Across Britain, creative professionals have protested against a ministerial proposal to let AI companies utilize copyright-protected work without permission unless the rights holder opts out. Almost every participant to a government consultation on the proposal has backed artists’ apprehensions.
A government minister for technology, innovation and technology told parliament this month there was “little consensus” on the matter, noting 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.
