A digital rights group has claimed to have scraped millions of tracks from Spotify and is preparing to publish them online.
Possible Impetus for AI Training
Industry experts said the seeming data breach could boost AI companies searching for data to develop their models.
An entity known as Anna’s Archive said it had scraped 86 million music files from the platform and 256 million rows of metadata such as artist and record names. The company, which carries more than 100 million songs, stated that the breach did not represent its full catalog.
“We have located and disabled the nefarious user accounts that engaged in unlawful scraping,” stated a Spotify representative.
The Swedish company, which has more than 700 million users worldwide, added that an investigation into unauthorized access identified a external actor collected public metadata and used questionable methods to circumvent DRM protections.
Group's Declared Mission and Concerns
Spotify does not think the audio taken by Anna’s Archive has been made public 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 represented 99.6% of all music streamed to by its listeners and would be shared via ‘peer-to-peer networks’, 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 great start,” commented Anna’s Archive, which describes its mission as “preserving humanity’s knowledge and culture”.
AI Training and Intellectual Property Debate
A composer and campaigner for protecting artists’ copyright, said the breached music would likely be utilized for developing artificial intelligence systems.
“Training on pirated data is unfortunately common in the tech sector, so this stolen music is highly likely to be used training AI models,” he said.
The group's website makes references to LibGen, a huge online archive of pirated books that has reportedly been leveraged by the parent company of Facebook to train its systems.
A founder of an AI startup wrote on LinkedIn that members of the public could in principle “build their own personal free equivalent of Spotify”. He added it could also enable tech companies to “train on contemporary music at a large volume”.
Intellectual property law has become a key issue between artists, authors and content creators on one side and tech giants on the other.
Government Proposals and Responses
In the UK, artists and writers have raised concerns against a government proposal to let AI companies utilize copyright-protected work without consent unless the rights holder opts out. Virtually every respondent to a government call for evidence on the proposal has backed artists’ concerns.
A government minister for science, research and technology informed parliament this month there was “no clear consensus” on the matter, 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.
