A digital rights organization has claimed to have harvested a vast number of songs from the popular streaming service and is preparing to release them publicly.
Possible Impetus for Artificial Intelligence Training
Industry experts said the seeming data breach could aid artificial intelligence firms searching for material to develop their models.
An entity called Anna’s Archive reported it had obtained 86 million audio tracks from the platform and 256 million entries of associated data such as performer and album names. The company, which hosts more than 100 million tracks, confirmed that the leak did not represent its entire inventory.
“We have located and disabled the nefarious user accounts that engaged in unlawful scraping,” stated a Spotify spokesperson.
The Swedish service, which has more than 700 million subscribers worldwide, added that an investigation into unauthorised access identified a third party scraped public metadata and employed questionable methods to circumvent DRM protections.
Archive's Stated Mission and Worries
The streaming service does not believe the audio taken by Anna’s Archive has been released yet. Anna’s Archive, which is known for providing links to pirated books, wrote in a blog it wanted to create a ‘historical repository’ for music.
The group asserted the music files accounted for 99.6% of all music streamed to by its listeners and would be distributed via ‘torrents’, a means of exchanging large digital files online.
“Naturally the service doesn’t have all the music in the world, but it’s a fantastic start,” said Anna’s Archive, which describes its purpose as “safeguarding humanity’s information and heritage”.
Model Development and Intellectual Property Battleground
A composer and campaigner for defending artists’ rights, said the leaked music would probably be used for training artificial intelligence systems.
“Training on pirated data is sadly widespread in the AI industry, so this accessed music is highly likely to end up training AI models,” he said.
The group's website alludes to a large online archive, a huge online archive of pirated books that has reportedly been used by the parent company of Facebook to develop its AI models.
The co-founder of an artificial intelligence company posted on the professional network that members of the public could in theory “create their own personal free version of the service”. The executive added it could also enable tech companies to “train on modern music at scale”.
Intellectual property law has become a battleground between artists, writers and creatives on one side and tech giants on the other.
Policy Proposals and Reactions
Across Britain, creative professionals have protested against a government suggestion to let AI companies utilize protected work without permission unless the rights holder opts out. Almost every respondent to a government consultation on the idea has backed artists’ apprehensions.
The secretary of state for technology, innovation and development informed parliament this month there was “no clear consensus” on the matter, noting that ministers would “use the time to get this correct”. The government has committed to make regulatory plans on AI and copyright by next year.
