A digital rights group has claimed to have harvested a vast number of tracks from Spotify and is getting ready to publish them online.
Potential Impetus for AI Training
Industry experts noted the apparent leak could aid AI companies looking for material to train their models.
An entity known as Anna’s Archive said it had scraped 86 million audio tracks from Spotify and 256 million rows of metadata such as performer and album names. Spotify, which carries more than 100 million songs, confirmed that the leak did not constitute its entire catalog.
“We have located and deactivated the malicious user accounts that were involved in illegal scraping,” said a company spokesperson.
The Swedish company, which has more than 700 million subscribers worldwide, further explained that an investigation into unauthorised access found a third party scraped public metadata and used illicit methods to bypass DRM protections.
Archive's Stated Goal and Concerns
The streaming service does not believe the music acquired by Anna’s Archive has been released yet. Anna’s Archive, which is known for offering links to copyright-infringing books, wrote in a blog it wanted to create a ‘historical repository’ for music.
They claimed the audio files represented 99.6% of all music streamed to by Spotify users and would be shared via ‘torrents’, a means of exchanging large digital files online.
“Of course the service doesn’t have all the music in the world, but it’s a great beginning,” commented Anna’s Archive, which frames its mission as “safeguarding humanity’s information and culture”.
Model Development and Copyright Battleground
Ed Newton-Rex for protecting artists’ copyright, remarked the breached music would probably be utilized for training AI models.
“Educating models on illegally sourced data is unfortunately common in the tech sector, so this accessed music is almost certain to be used instructing AI models,” he said.
The group's website makes references to a large online archive, a huge online archive of copyrighted books that has allegedly been used by the parent company of Facebook to develop its systems.
The co-founder of an artificial intelligence company wrote on LinkedIn that members of the public could in principle “build their own private free equivalent of the service”. He said it could also allow tech companies to “train on contemporary music at a large volume”.
Intellectual property law has become a battleground between creatives, writers and creatives on one side and AI companies on the other.
Government Considerations and Reactions
In the UK, artists and writers have protested against a government suggestion to allow AI companies use copyright-protected work without permission unless the owner opts out. Virtually every respondent to a government call for evidence on the proposal has backed artists’ concerns.
A government minister for technology, innovation and technology told parliament this month there was “little consensus” on the issue, noting that ministers would “use the time to get this right”. The government has committed to make policy proposals on AI and copyright by March 2025.
