A digital rights organization has claimed to have scraped a vast number of tracks from the popular streaming service and is getting ready to release them online.
Potential Impetus for AI Development
Industry experts said the seeming leak could boost AI companies looking for data to train their technology.
An entity called Anna’s Archive said it had obtained 86 million music files from the platform and 256 million rows of associated data such as artist and album names. The company, which hosts more than 100 million tracks, stated that the leak did not constitute its entire inventory.
“We have located and disabled the nefarious user accounts that were involved in illegal scraping,” said a company representative.
The Stockholm-based company, which has more than 700 million subscribers worldwide, added that an investigation into unauthorized access identified a external actor scraped public metadata and employed illicit tactics to circumvent DRM [digital rights management].
Archive's Declared Mission and Worries
Spotify does not think the audio acquired by Anna’s Archive has been made public yet. Anna’s Archive, which is known for providing links to copyright-infringing books, said in a blog it wanted to create a ‘preservation archive’ for music.
The group asserted the music files represented 99.6% of all music listened to by Spotify users 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 great start,” commented Anna’s Archive, which describes its purpose as “safeguarding humanity’s information and heritage”.
AI Training and Copyright Battleground
A composer and campaigner for defending artists’ copyright, said the leaked music would likely be utilized for developing artificial intelligence systems.
“Educating models on illegally sourced data is sadly widespread in the AI industry, 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 repository of copyrighted books that has reportedly been leveraged by Meta to train its AI models.
The co-founder of an artificial intelligence company wrote on the professional network that members of the public could in principle “build their own private free equivalent of Spotify”. He added it could also allow tech companies to “train on contemporary music at scale”.
Intellectual property law has become a key issue between creatives, authors and content creators on one side and tech giants on the other.
Policy Proposals and Reactions
Across Britain, creative professionals have protested against a government suggestion to allow AI companies use copyright-protected work without permission unless the rights holder signals. Virtually every participant to a government consultation on the idea has supported artists’ apprehensions.
The secretary of state for science, innovation and development informed parliament this month there was “no clear consensus” on the issue, adding that ministers would “use the time to get this correct”. The government has committed to make policy proposals on AI and copyright by next year.
