A digital rights organization has claimed to have scraped a vast number of songs from the popular streaming service and is preparing to publish them publicly.
Possible Boost for AI Development
Observers noted the apparent data breach could boost artificial intelligence firms looking for material to develop their models.
An entity known as Anna’s Archive reported it had obtained 86 million music files from Spotify and 256 million entries of associated data such as artist and album names. The company, which hosts 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 spokesperson.
The Stockholm-based service, which has more than 700 million users worldwide, added that an inquiry into unauthorised access found a third party collected public metadata and employed illicit methods to bypass DRM [digital rights management].
Archive's Declared Goal and Concerns
Spotify does not believe the audio taken by Anna’s Archive has been made public yet. Anna’s Archive, which is known for providing links to pirated books, said in a blog it wanted to create a ‘preservation archive’ for music.
They claimed the music files accounted for 99.6% of all music streamed to by its listeners and would be distributed via ‘torrents’, a method of sharing large data files online.
“Of course 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 “safeguarding humanity’s information and culture”.
AI Training and Copyright Debate
A composer and campaigner for protecting artists’ copyright, remarked the leaked music would probably be utilized for training artificial intelligence systems.
“Educating models on pirated material is unfortunately widespread in the AI industry, so this stolen music is highly likely to end up training AI models,” he said.
The Anna’s Archive site alludes to a large online archive, a vast online repository of pirated books that has reportedly been used by the parent company of Facebook to train its systems.
A founder of an AI startup posted on the professional network that members of the public could in theory “build their own private free equivalent of Spotify”. The executive added it could also enable tech companies to “educate models on modern music at a large volume”.
Copyright has become a battleground between artists, writers and content creators on one side and tech giants on the other.
Policy Proposals and Responses
In the UK, artists and writers have raised concerns against a government proposal to allow AI companies utilize protected work without consent unless the owner opts out. Virtually every participant to a government consultation on the idea has supported artists’ concerns.
The secretary of state for science, innovation and development informed parliament this month there was “little consensus” on the issue, adding that ministers would “use the time to get this correct”. The government has pledged to make policy proposals on AI and copyright by next year.
