An activist group has claimed to have harvested millions of tracks from the popular streaming service and is preparing to release them online.
Potential Impetus for Artificial Intelligence Development
Industry experts said the seeming data breach could boost artificial intelligence firms looking for data to develop their technology.
An entity known as Anna’s Archive said it had obtained 86 million audio tracks from the platform and 256 million rows of associated data such as artist and album names. The company, which carries more than 100 million tracks, confirmed that the breach did not represent its entire catalog.
“We have identified and deactivated the malicious user accounts that engaged in unlawful scraping,” said a Spotify representative.
The Swedish service, which has more than 700 million subscribers worldwide, further explained that an inquiry into unauthorised access identified a third party scraped public metadata and employed questionable methods to bypass DRM protections.
Archive's Stated Goal and Worries
The streaming service does not think the music acquired by Anna’s Archive has been made public yet. Anna’s Archive, which is recognized for offering links to pirated books, said in a blog it wanted to create a ‘preservation archive’ for music.
The group asserted the music files accounted for 99.6% of all music streamed to by Spotify users and would be distributed via ‘torrents’, a method of sharing large digital files online.
“Naturally Spotify doesn’t have all the music in the world, but it’s a fantastic start,” commented Anna’s Archive, which describes its mission as “preserving humanity’s information and heritage”.
Model Development and Copyright Debate
Ed Newton-Rex for protecting artists’ rights, said the leaked music would likely be utilized for training artificial intelligence systems.
“Training on pirated material is unfortunately common in the tech sector, so this stolen music is almost certain to end up instructing AI models,” he stated.
The group's website alludes to LibGen, a huge online archive of copyrighted books that has allegedly been used by the parent company of Facebook to train its systems.
A founder of an artificial intelligence company posted on LinkedIn that individuals of the public could in principle “build their own private free equivalent of the service”. The executive added it could also enable technology firms to “train on contemporary music at a large volume”.
Intellectual property law has emerged as a battleground between artists, authors and content creators on one side and AI companies on the other.
Policy Proposals and Reactions
In the UK, creative professionals have raised concerns against a government proposal to allow AI companies use protected work without consent unless the rights holder opts out. Virtually every respondent to a government consultation on the idea has supported artists’ concerns.
A government minister for technology, innovation and development told parliament this month there was “little consensus” on the issue, noting that ministers would “take the time to get this right”. The government has pledged to make regulatory plans on AI and copyright by next year.
