An activist group has stated to have harvested millions of tracks from the popular streaming service and is getting ready to publish them online.
Potential Impetus for Artificial Intelligence Training
Industry experts said the apparent data breach could boost AI companies searching for material to train their models.
An entity known as Anna’s Archive said it had scraped 86 million music files from Spotify and 256 million entries of metadata such as performer and album names. Spotify, which hosts more than 100 million songs, confirmed that the breach did not represent its entire inventory.
“We have identified and disabled the malicious user accounts that engaged in unlawful scraping,” said a company spokesperson.
The Stockholm-based service, which has more than 700 million users worldwide, further explained that an investigation into unauthorised access found a third party scraped public metadata and employed illicit methods to bypass DRM [digital rights management].
Archive's Declared Goal and Concerns
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 copyright-infringing books, said in a blog it wanted to create a ‘historical repository’ for music.
They claimed the music files accounted for 99.6% of all music streamed to by Spotify users and would be distributed via ‘torrents’, a means of exchanging large data files online.
“Naturally the service doesn’t have all the music in the world, but it’s a great beginning,” said Anna’s Archive, which frames its purpose as “preserving humanity’s knowledge and heritage”.
Model Development and Copyright Battleground
Ed Newton-Rex for defending artists’ copyright, remarked the breached music would likely be used for training AI models.
“Training on illegally sourced data is sadly widespread in the tech sector, so this stolen music is almost certain to be used instructing AI models,” he stated.
The group's website alludes to LibGen, a vast online archive of copyrighted books that has allegedly been leveraged by the parent company of Facebook to train its systems.
The co-founder of an artificial intelligence company posted on the professional network that members of the public could in theory “build their own private free version of Spotify”. The executive said it could also allow tech companies to “train on modern music at scale”.
Copyright has become a battleground between creatives, writers and creatives on one side and AI companies on the other.
Policy Proposals and Responses
In the UK, artists and writers have protested against a government suggestion to allow AI companies use copyright-protected work without consent unless the rights holder signals. Virtually every respondent to a government call for evidence on the proposal has supported artists’ apprehensions.
A government minister for technology, research and technology informed parliament this month there was “little consensus” on the issue, adding that ministers would “use the time to get this right”. The government has committed to make policy proposals on AI and copyright by next year.
