A digital rights group has claimed to have harvested a vast number of songs from Spotify and is getting ready to release them online.
Potential Impetus for Artificial Intelligence Training
Industry experts said the seeming data breach could boost artificial intelligence firms looking for material to develop their technology.
A group known as Anna’s Archive said it had obtained 86 million music files from Spotify and 256 million entries of metadata such as artist and album names. The company, which carries more than 100 million songs, stated that the breach did not constitute its full catalog.
“We have identified and deactivated the nefarious user accounts that were involved in unlawful scraping,” said a Spotify spokesperson.
The Stockholm-based company, which has more than 700 million users worldwide, further explained that an investigation into unauthorized access found a external actor scraped public metadata and employed illicit methods to bypass DRM [digital rights management].
Archive's Declared Goal and Worries
The streaming service does not think the music 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 ‘historical repository’ for music.
The group claimed the music files represented 99.6% of all music listened 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 great beginning,” said Anna’s Archive, which describes its purpose as “safeguarding humanity’s knowledge and heritage”.
AI Training and Intellectual Property Battleground
A composer and campaigner for protecting artists’ copyright, said the leaked music would probably be used for training artificial intelligence systems.
“Training on illegally sourced material is unfortunately widespread in the tech sector, so this accessed music is almost certain to end up training AI models,” he stated.
The Anna’s Archive site alludes to LibGen, a huge online archive of pirated books that has allegedly been leveraged by the parent company of Facebook to develop its AI models.
A founder of an AI startup posted on LinkedIn that individuals of the public could in principle “build their own personal free version of the service”. The executive added it could also allow technology firms to “educate models on modern music at scale”.
Intellectual property law has emerged as a battleground between creatives, authors and creatives on one side and tech giants on the other.
Policy Proposals and Reactions
Across Britain, creative professionals have protested against a ministerial suggestion to let AI companies utilize protected work without consent unless the owner opts out. Almost every participant to a government consultation on the idea has backed artists’ concerns.
The secretary of state for technology, innovation and development told parliament this month there was “no clear consensus” on the matter, adding that ministers would “use the time to get this right”. The government has pledged to make policy proposals on AI and copyright by next year.
