An activist organization has claimed to have harvested millions of songs from the popular streaming service and is preparing to release them online.
Possible Impetus for Artificial Intelligence Development
Industry experts noted the seeming leak could aid artificial intelligence firms searching for data to train their technology.
An entity called Anna’s Archive reported it had scraped 86 million audio tracks from Spotify and 256 million entries of metadata such as artist and record names. Spotify, which hosts more than 100 million tracks, confirmed that the leak did not represent its entire catalog.
“We have identified and disabled the nefarious user accounts that were involved in illegal scraping,” said a Spotify spokesperson.
The Swedish company, which has more than 700 million subscribers worldwide, added that an investigation into unauthorized access found a third party scraped public metadata and used questionable tactics to circumvent DRM protections.
Archive's Declared Goal and Concerns
The streaming service does not think the audio taken by Anna’s Archive has been released yet. Anna’s Archive, which is known for providing links to copyright-infringing books, wrote in a blog it wanted to create a ‘historical repository’ for music.
They asserted the music files accounted for 99.6% of all music listened to by its listeners and would be shared via ‘peer-to-peer networks’, a means of sharing large data files online.
“Naturally Spotify doesn’t have all the music in the world, but it’s a fantastic beginning,” said Anna’s Archive, which frames its mission as “safeguarding humanity’s knowledge and culture”.
AI Training and Copyright Battleground
Ed Newton-Rex for defending artists’ copyright, said the leaked music would probably be used for training artificial intelligence systems.
“Training on illegally sourced material is unfortunately common in the AI industry, so this stolen music is almost certain to end up training AI models,” he said.
The Anna’s Archive site makes references to LibGen, a huge online repository 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 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 “train on modern music at a large volume”.
Copyright has emerged as a battleground between creatives, writers and creatives on one side and AI companies on the other.
Government Considerations and Reactions
Across Britain, artists and writers have protested against a government suggestion to allow AI companies utilize protected work without permission unless the owner signals. Almost every participant to a government call for evidence on the proposal has supported artists’ concerns.
The secretary of state for science, innovation and development informed parliament this month there was “little consensus” on the matter, 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.
