A digital rights group has claimed to have harvested millions of tracks from the popular streaming service and is preparing to publish them publicly.
Potential Boost for Artificial Intelligence Development
Industry experts said the apparent leak could aid artificial intelligence firms looking for data to train their technology.
A group known as Anna’s Archive reported it had scraped 86 million audio tracks from Spotify and 256 million rows of metadata such as artist and record names. The company, which hosts more than 100 million songs, stated that the leak did not constitute its entire inventory.
“We have located and deactivated the malicious user accounts that engaged in unlawful scraping,” said a Spotify representative.
The Stockholm-based service, which has more than 700 million subscribers worldwide, further explained that an investigation into unauthorised access found a external actor scraped public metadata and employed illicit methods to bypass DRM [digital rights management].
Group's Declared Goal and Concerns
Spotify does not believe the music taken by Anna’s Archive has been made public yet. Anna’s Archive, which is recognized for providing links to copyright-infringing books, wrote in a blog it wanted to create a ‘historical repository’ for music.
They claimed the music files accounted for 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,” said Anna’s Archive, which frames its mission as “preserving humanity’s knowledge and heritage”.
AI Training and Copyright Debate
A composer and campaigner for protecting artists’ copyright, said the leaked music would probably be used for training artificial intelligence systems.
“Educating models on illegally sourced material is unfortunately widespread in the AI industry, so this stolen music is highly likely to end up training AI models,” he said.
The group's website alludes to LibGen, a vast online archive of pirated books that has allegedly been leveraged by the parent company of Facebook to train its systems.
A founder of an AI startup wrote on LinkedIn that individuals of the public could in theory “create their own personal free version of Spotify”. The executive said it could also enable tech companies to “train on modern music at a large volume”.
Intellectual property law has emerged as a battleground between creatives, authors and content creators on one side and tech giants on the other.
Policy Proposals and Responses
Across Britain, creative professionals have raised concerns against a government proposal to allow AI companies utilize protected work without consent unless the rights holder opts out. Almost every participant to a government call for evidence on the idea has supported artists’ concerns.
The secretary of state for technology, research and development informed parliament this month there was “no clear consensus” on the issue, adding that ministers would “take the time to get this right”. The government has committed to make policy proposals on AI and copyright by next year.
