Advocacy Collective Asserts to Have Extracted Millions of Music Tracks from Spotify
A digital rights organization has stated to have harvested millions of tracks from the popular streaming service and is getting ready to release them publicly.
Potential Impetus for AI Development
Industry experts noted the apparent data breach could boost AI companies searching for data to train their technology.
An entity called Anna’s Archive said it had scraped 86 million audio tracks from the platform and 256 million entries of associated data such as artist and album names. The company, which hosts more than 100 million tracks, confirmed that the breach did not represent its entire inventory.
“We have located and disabled the nefarious user accounts that engaged in illegal scraping,” said a company spokesperson.
The Stockholm-based service, which has more than 700 million subscribers worldwide, added that an investigation into unauthorized access identified a external actor scraped public metadata and used illicit methods to bypass DRM [digital rights management].
Archive's Stated Mission and Concerns
Spotify does not believe the audio acquired by Anna’s Archive has been released yet. Anna’s Archive, which is known for providing links to copyright-infringing books, wrote in a blog it wanted to create a ‘historical repository’ for music.
They asserted the audio files accounted for 99.6% of all music streamed to by Spotify users and would be distributed via ‘torrents’, a means of sharing large data files online.
“Naturally Spotify doesn’t have all the music in the world, but it’s a fantastic start,” said Anna’s Archive, which frames its purpose as “safeguarding humanity’s knowledge and culture”.
Model Development and Copyright Battleground
Ed Newton-Rex for protecting artists’ rights, remarked the leaked music would probably be used for developing AI models.
“Training on pirated material is sadly widespread in the tech sector, so this stolen music is highly likely to end up instructing AI models,” he said.
The Anna’s Archive site alludes to a large online archive, a vast online repository of pirated books that has allegedly been leveraged by Meta to develop its AI models.
The co-founder of an AI startup posted on the professional network that members of the public could in theory “create their own private free version of the service”. The executive said it could also allow tech companies to “educate models on modern music at a large volume”.
Intellectual property law has become a key issue between artists, authors and creatives on one side and tech giants on the other.
Policy Considerations and Reactions
In the UK, artists and writers have protested against a ministerial suggestion to let AI companies use protected work without consent unless the rights holder opts out. Virtually every respondent to a government consultation on the proposal has backed artists’ concerns.
A government minister for technology, innovation and technology informed parliament this month there was “no clear consensus” on the issue, adding that ministers would “take the time to get this right”. The administration has pledged to make regulatory plans on AI and copyright by next year.