An activist organization has stated to have scraped millions of songs from Spotify and is getting ready to publish them publicly.
Possible Impetus for Artificial Intelligence Training
Industry experts noted the apparent leak could aid AI companies looking for material to develop their models.
A group known as Anna’s Archive reported it had scraped 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 songs, confirmed that the leak did not constitute its entire inventory.
“We have located and deactivated the nefarious user accounts that were involved in unlawful scraping,” said a company representative.
The Swedish service, which has more than 700 million subscribers worldwide, further explained that an inquiry into unauthorized access identified a external actor scraped public metadata and employed illicit tactics to bypass DRM [digital rights management].
Group's Stated Goal and Concerns
Spotify does not think the audio taken by Anna’s Archive has been made public yet. Anna’s Archive, which is known for providing links to pirated books, wrote 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 distributed via ‘torrents’, a means of sharing large data files online.
“Of course the service doesn’t have all the music in the world, but it’s a fantastic start,” commented Anna’s Archive, which frames its purpose as “preserving humanity’s knowledge and heritage”.
Model Development and Intellectual Property Debate
A composer and campaigner for protecting artists’ rights, remarked the leaked music would probably be used for training artificial intelligence systems.
“Training on illegally sourced data is unfortunately widespread in the tech sector, so this accessed music is highly likely to end up instructing AI models,” he said.
The Anna’s Archive site makes references to LibGen, a huge online archive of copyrighted books that has allegedly been leveraged by Meta to train its AI models.
The co-founder of an AI startup posted on the professional network that individuals of the public could in principle “build their own private free equivalent of Spotify”. The executive said it could also allow tech companies to “train on contemporary music at scale”.
Copyright has emerged as a battleground between creatives, authors and content creators on one side and tech giants on the other.
Policy Considerations and Reactions
In the UK, artists and writers have raised concerns against a government suggestion to allow AI companies use protected work without consent unless the owner signals. Almost every respondent to a government call for evidence on the idea has supported artists’ apprehensions.
A government minister for science, research and development informed parliament this month there was “no clear consensus” on the issue, adding that ministers would “use the time to get this right”. The government has pledged to make regulatory plans on AI and copyright by next year.
