A digital rights organization has stated to have harvested millions of songs from Spotify and is getting ready to publish them online.
Possible Impetus for Artificial Intelligence Training
Industry experts said the seeming leak could boost artificial intelligence firms looking for material to train their models.
An entity called Anna’s Archive said it had scraped 86 million music files from the platform and 256 million entries of metadata such as performer and record names. Spotify, which carries more than 100 million songs, stated that the breach did not constitute its full catalog.
“We have located and disabled the nefarious user accounts that engaged in unlawful scraping,” stated a company representative.
The Swedish company, which has more than 700 million users worldwide, added that an investigation into unauthorised access found a external actor scraped public metadata and employed questionable tactics to circumvent DRM protections.
Archive's Declared Goal and Worries
Spotify does not believe the audio taken by Anna’s Archive has been released yet. Anna’s Archive, which is known for offering links to copyright-infringing books, said in a blog it wanted to create a ‘historical repository’ for music.
The group asserted the audio files represented 99.6% of all music listened to by Spotify users and would be distributed via ‘torrents’, a means of sharing large digital files online.
“Of course the service doesn’t have all the music in the world, but it’s a great start,” commented Anna’s Archive, which frames its purpose as “safeguarding humanity’s knowledge and culture”.
Model Development and Copyright Debate
Ed Newton-Rex for protecting artists’ copyright, said the leaked music would likely be used for developing artificial intelligence systems.
“Training on pirated material is unfortunately widespread in the AI industry, so this accessed music is almost certain to end up instructing AI models,” he said.
The Anna’s Archive site makes references to a large online archive, a huge online repository of pirated books that has allegedly been used by the parent company of Facebook to develop its AI models.
The co-founder of an AI startup wrote on the professional network that members of the public could in theory “build their own private free version of the service”. He added it could also enable tech companies to “educate models on modern music at a large volume”.
Intellectual property law has emerged as a battleground between creatives, writers and content creators on one side and AI companies on the other.
Government Proposals and Reactions
In the UK, creative professionals have raised concerns against a ministerial proposal to allow AI companies utilize protected work without consent unless the rights holder opts out. Almost every participant to a government call for evidence on the proposal has supported artists’ concerns.
A government minister for technology, research and development informed parliament this month there was “little consensus” on the issue, noting that ministers would “take the time to get this right”. The government has pledged to make policy proposals on AI and copyright by next year.
