An activist group has claimed to have scraped a vast number of songs from Spotify and is preparing to publish them online.
Potential Impetus for AI Development
Industry experts said the apparent data breach could boost AI companies looking for material to develop their technology.
A group known as Anna’s Archive reported it had obtained 86 million music files from Spotify and 256 million entries of metadata such as performer and record names. Spotify, which carries more than 100 million songs, confirmed that the breach did not represent its entire inventory.
“We have identified and deactivated the malicious user accounts that were involved in unlawful scraping,” said a Spotify spokesperson.
The Stockholm-based company, which has more than 700 million users worldwide, added that an inquiry into unauthorised access found a third party scraped public metadata and used illicit methods to bypass DRM [digital rights management].
Archive's Declared Goal and Worries
The streaming service does not think the audio taken by Anna’s Archive has been released yet. Anna’s Archive, which is recognized for offering links to copyright-infringing books, said in a blog it wanted to create a ‘historical repository’ for music.
The group asserted the music files accounted for 99.6% of all music streamed to by Spotify users and would be shared via ‘peer-to-peer networks’, a means of exchanging large data files online.
“Naturally Spotify doesn’t have all the music in the world, but it’s a great start,” said Anna’s Archive, which describes its mission as “preserving humanity’s information and culture”.
Model Development and Intellectual Property Battleground
Ed Newton-Rex for protecting artists’ copyright, said the leaked music would likely be utilized for training artificial intelligence systems.
“Training on illegally sourced data is unfortunately widespread in the tech sector, so this accessed music is almost certain to end up training AI models,” he said.
The group's website alludes to a large online archive, a vast online repository of pirated books that has reportedly been leveraged by the parent company of Facebook to develop its AI models.
A founder of an AI startup posted on the professional network that members of the public could in principle “build their own private free equivalent of Spotify”. The executive added it could also enable tech companies to “train on modern music at scale”.
Intellectual property law has become a battleground between creatives, authors and content creators on one side and AI companies on the other.
Government Proposals and Responses
Across Britain, artists and writers have raised concerns against a ministerial suggestion to allow AI companies utilize protected work without consent unless the owner signals. Virtually every respondent to a government consultation on the proposal has supported artists’ apprehensions.
The secretary of state for science, research and technology told parliament this month there was “little consensus” on the matter, noting that ministers would “use the time to get this right”. The administration has pledged to make regulatory plans on AI and copyright by March 2025.
