An activist group has stated to have harvested millions of songs from Spotify and is getting ready to publish them online.
Potential Boost for AI Development
Industry experts noted the apparent leak could boost AI companies looking for data to train their models.
A group called Anna’s Archive reported it had obtained 86 million audio tracks from the platform and 256 million entries of metadata such as performer and record names. The company, which carries more than 100 million tracks, stated that the leak did not constitute its full inventory.
“We have identified and disabled the nefarious user accounts that were involved in illegal scraping,” stated a company representative.
The Swedish company, which has more than 700 million users worldwide, further explained that an inquiry into unauthorized access identified a third party scraped public metadata and employed illicit tactics to circumvent DRM [digital rights management].
Group's Declared Mission and Concerns
The streaming service does not believe the audio taken 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 ‘preservation archive’ 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 means of sharing large digital files online.
“Naturally the service doesn’t have all the music in the world, but it’s a fantastic beginning,” said Anna’s Archive, which describes its mission as “safeguarding humanity’s information and heritage”.
Model Development and Intellectual Property Battleground
Ed Newton-Rex for defending artists’ copyright, remarked the breached music would probably be used for training artificial intelligence systems.
“Educating models on illegally sourced data is sadly common in the AI industry, so this accessed music is almost certain to end up training AI models,” he said.
The group's website makes references to a large online archive, a vast online archive of copyrighted books that has reportedly been leveraged by the parent company of Facebook to develop its systems.
A founder of an artificial intelligence company posted on LinkedIn that members of the public could in theory “create their own private free equivalent of Spotify”. The executive said it could also enable technology firms to “educate models on contemporary music at scale”.
Copyright has become a battleground between artists, writers and creatives on one side and AI companies on the other.
Government Proposals and Reactions
In the UK, artists and writers have protested against a government suggestion to let AI companies utilize protected work without permission unless the rights holder signals. Virtually every respondent to a government consultation on the proposal has supported artists’ apprehensions.
A government minister for science, research and development informed parliament this month there was “little consensus” on the matter, noting that ministers would “take the time to get this right”. The government has committed to make policy proposals on AI and copyright by next year.
