Activist Collective Claims to Have Extracted Millions of Audio Tracks from the Streaming Giant
An activist group has stated to have harvested millions of songs from the popular streaming service and is getting ready to release them online.
Potential Boost for Artificial Intelligence Development
Observers noted the apparent leak could aid artificial intelligence firms searching for data to develop their technology.
An entity called Anna’s Archive reported it had scraped 86 million music files from the platform and 256 million rows of metadata such as artist and album names. Spotify, which hosts more than 100 million tracks, confirmed that the leak did not represent its entire catalog.
“We have located and deactivated the nefarious user accounts that were involved in illegal scraping,” said a Spotify spokesperson.
The Stockholm-based service, which has more than 700 million users worldwide, further explained that an investigation into unauthorized access identified a third party collected public metadata and used questionable tactics to bypass DRM [digital rights management].
Group's Declared Goal and Concerns
The streaming service does not think the music acquired by Anna’s Archive has been released yet. Anna’s Archive, which is recognized for providing links to copyright-infringing books, said in a blog it wanted to create a ‘preservation archive’ for music.
They claimed the music files represented 99.6% of all music listened to by its listeners and would be shared via ‘torrents’, a method of sharing large digital files online.
“Naturally the service doesn’t have all the music in the world, but it’s a great start,” said Anna’s Archive, which frames its purpose as “preserving humanity’s information and heritage”.
Model Development and Intellectual Property Battleground
Ed Newton-Rex for defending artists’ copyright, said the breached music would likely be utilized for training artificial intelligence systems.
“Educating models on pirated data is unfortunately common in the AI industry, so this accessed music is highly likely to end up instructing AI models,” he said.
The group's website makes references to LibGen, a vast online repository of copyrighted books that has allegedly been used by the parent company of Facebook to train its systems.
A founder of an artificial intelligence company posted on the professional network that individuals of the public could in principle “build their own private free version of the service”. The executive said it could also allow technology firms to “train on modern music at scale”.
Copyright has emerged as a battleground between creatives, authors and creatives on one side and AI companies on the other.
Government Proposals and Responses
Across Britain, artists and writers have raised concerns against a ministerial proposal to let AI companies utilize copyright-protected work without consent unless the owner opts out. Virtually every respondent to a government call for evidence on the idea has supported artists’ apprehensions.
A government minister for science, research and development told parliament this month there was “little consensus” on the matter, noting that ministers would “use the time to get this correct”. The government has committed to make regulatory plans on AI and copyright by next year.
