An activist group has claimed to have harvested millions of songs from the popular streaming service and is preparing to release them publicly.
Possible Boost for Artificial Intelligence Development
Industry experts said the seeming leak could boost AI companies looking for data to develop their models.
An entity known as Anna’s Archive said it had scraped 86 million audio tracks from Spotify and 256 million rows of metadata such as performer and album names. Spotify, which hosts more than 100 million tracks, confirmed that the leak did not represent its entire inventory.
“We have identified and deactivated the malicious user accounts that were involved in illegal scraping,” said a company representative.
The Swedish service, which has more than 700 million subscribers worldwide, further explained that an investigation into unauthorised access identified a external actor collected public metadata and used illicit tactics to bypass DRM [digital rights management].
Archive's Declared Mission and Concerns
The streaming service does not think the audio taken by Anna’s Archive has been made public yet. Anna’s Archive, which is recognized for providing links to pirated books, said in a blog it wanted to create a ‘preservation archive’ for music.
The group asserted the audio files accounted for 99.6% of all music streamed to by its listeners and would be shared via ‘torrents’, a means of exchanging large digital files online.
“Naturally Spotify doesn’t have all the music in the world, but it’s a fantastic beginning,” said Anna’s Archive, which frames its mission as “safeguarding humanity’s knowledge and heritage”.
Model Development and Intellectual Property Battleground
Ed Newton-Rex for protecting artists’ rights, remarked the leaked music would likely be used for developing AI models.
“Educating models on pirated material is unfortunately widespread 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 a large online archive, a huge online archive of copyrighted books that has reportedly been used by the parent company of Facebook to develop its AI models.
The co-founder of an AI startup wrote on LinkedIn that individuals of the public could in principle “build their own personal free version of Spotify”. He said it could also allow technology firms to “educate models on contemporary music at a large volume”.
Intellectual property law has become a key issue between creatives, writers and creatives on one side and tech giants on the other.
Policy Proposals and Responses
In the UK, creative professionals have raised concerns against a government suggestion to allow AI companies utilize copyright-protected work without consent unless the rights holder signals. Almost every respondent to a government call for evidence on the proposal has backed artists’ concerns.
The secretary of state for science, innovation and technology informed parliament this month there was “little consensus” on the issue, adding that ministers would “take the time to get this right”. The administration has pledged to make policy proposals on AI and copyright by next year.
