An activist organization has claimed to have harvested millions of tracks from Spotify and is getting ready to publish them publicly.
Possible Impetus for Artificial Intelligence Development
Industry experts said the seeming data breach could boost artificial intelligence firms looking for material to develop their models.
A group known as Anna’s Archive reported it had obtained 86 million audio tracks from the platform and 256 million rows of associated data such as artist and record names. Spotify, which hosts more than 100 million songs, confirmed that the leak did not constitute its full inventory.
“We have located and disabled the nefarious user accounts that engaged in unlawful scraping,” said a Spotify spokesperson.
The Swedish service, which has more than 700 million subscribers worldwide, further explained that an inquiry into unauthorised access identified a external actor scraped public metadata and used questionable tactics to bypass DRM [digital rights management].
Group's Stated Goal and Concerns
Spotify does not think the audio acquired by Anna’s Archive has been released yet. Anna’s Archive, which is known for offering links to pirated books, wrote in a blog it wanted to create a ‘preservation archive’ for music.
They claimed the audio files represented 99.6% of all music listened to by Spotify users and would be shared via ‘torrents’, a method of sharing large data files online.
“Of course the service doesn’t have all the music in the world, but it’s a fantastic beginning,” commented Anna’s Archive, which frames its purpose as “safeguarding humanity’s knowledge and culture”.
AI Training and Intellectual Property Battleground
A composer and campaigner for protecting artists’ copyright, remarked the leaked music would probably be used for training artificial intelligence systems.
“Training on pirated data is unfortunately widespread in the AI industry, so this accessed music is almost certain to end up training AI models,” he said.
The Anna’s Archive site 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 AI models.
The co-founder of an artificial intelligence company wrote on the professional network that members of the public could in principle “create their own private free equivalent of the service”. He said it could also allow tech companies to “educate models on modern music at scale”.
Intellectual property law has emerged as a battleground between artists, authors and content creators on one side and tech giants on the other.
Policy Considerations and Responses
In the UK, creative professionals have raised concerns against a government suggestion to let AI companies utilize copyright-protected work without permission unless the owner opts out. Almost every participant to a government call for evidence on the proposal has supported artists’ concerns.
A government minister for science, innovation and technology informed parliament this month there was “little consensus” on the issue, adding that ministers would “take the time to get this correct”. The government has pledged to make policy proposals on AI and copyright by next year.
