An activist organization has claimed to have harvested millions of songs from Spotify and is getting ready to publish them online.
Possible Impetus for Artificial Intelligence Development
Industry experts said the apparent leak could boost artificial intelligence firms searching for material to develop their technology.
A group called Anna’s Archive reported it had obtained 86 million audio tracks from Spotify and 256 million entries of associated data such as artist and album names. The company, which hosts more than 100 million songs, confirmed that the leak did not represent its entire catalog.
“We have located and disabled the nefarious user accounts that engaged in illegal scraping,” said a Spotify representative.
The Stockholm-based service, which has more than 700 million users worldwide, added that an investigation into unauthorized access identified a external actor scraped public metadata and used illicit tactics to circumvent DRM [digital rights management].
Group's Stated Goal and Worries
Spotify does not think the music acquired 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.
The group asserted the audio files accounted for 99.6% of all music listened to by its listeners and would be shared via ‘torrents’, a method of exchanging large digital files online.
“Of course the service doesn’t have all the music in the world, but it’s a fantastic beginning,” said Anna’s Archive, which describes its mission as “safeguarding humanity’s knowledge and heritage”.
AI Training and Intellectual Property Battleground
A composer and campaigner for protecting artists’ rights, remarked the breached music would probably be utilized for training artificial intelligence systems.
“Educating models on pirated material is sadly common in the tech sector, so this stolen music is highly likely to end up instructing AI models,” he said.
The Anna’s Archive site alludes to a large online archive, a huge online repository of copyrighted books that has allegedly been leveraged by the parent company of Facebook to develop its systems.
The co-founder of an AI startup wrote on LinkedIn that members of the public could in principle “build their own personal free version 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, authors and creatives on one side and AI companies on the other.
Policy Considerations and Responses
In the UK, creative professionals have protested against a ministerial suggestion to allow AI companies utilize protected work without permission unless the owner signals. Virtually every respondent to a government call for evidence on the proposal has backed artists’ concerns.
A government minister for science, innovation and technology told parliament this month there was “no clear consensus” on the issue, adding that ministers would “take the time to get this correct”. The administration has pledged to make policy proposals on AI and copyright by next year.
