A digital rights organization has claimed to have harvested a vast number of songs from Spotify and is getting ready to publish them publicly.
Potential Impetus for AI Training
Industry experts noted the seeming leak could aid AI companies looking for material to train their technology.
A group known as Anna’s Archive reported it had obtained 86 million music files from Spotify and 256 million rows of associated data such as artist and record names. The company, which carries more than 100 million tracks, confirmed that the leak did not represent its entire catalog.
“We have located and disabled the malicious user accounts that engaged in unlawful scraping,” stated a company spokesperson.
The Stockholm-based service, which has more than 700 million users worldwide, further explained that an inquiry into unauthorized access identified a third party scraped public metadata and employed questionable tactics to bypass DRM protections.
Archive's Stated Goal and Concerns
Spotify does not think the audio acquired by Anna’s Archive has been released yet. Anna’s Archive, which is recognized for providing links to pirated books, wrote in a blog it wanted to create a ‘preservation archive’ for music.
The group claimed the music files represented 99.6% of all music listened to by Spotify users and would be distributed via ‘peer-to-peer networks’, a means of sharing large digital files online.
“Naturally the service doesn’t have all the music in the world, but it’s a great start,” said Anna’s Archive, which describes its purpose as “safeguarding humanity’s information and culture”.
Model Development and Intellectual Property Battleground
Ed Newton-Rex for defending artists’ copyright, remarked the leaked music would probably be used for developing artificial intelligence systems.
“Educating models on pirated data is sadly widespread in the tech sector, so this stolen music is highly likely to end up instructing AI models,” he stated.
The Anna’s Archive site alludes to a large online archive, a huge online repository of copyrighted books that has allegedly been leveraged by the parent company of Facebook to train its systems.
The co-founder of an AI startup wrote on LinkedIn that individuals of the public could in principle “create their own private free version of the service”. He said it could also enable tech companies to “train on modern music at scale”.
Copyright has become a key issue between creatives, authors and creatives on one side and AI companies on the other.
Policy Considerations and Responses
Across Britain, creative professionals have raised concerns against a government suggestion to allow AI companies use protected work without consent unless the owner signals. Almost every respondent to a government call for evidence on the proposal has backed artists’ concerns.
The secretary of state for technology, innovation and technology told parliament this month there was “no clear consensus” on the issue, noting that ministers would “use the time to get this correct”. The government has pledged to make regulatory plans on AI and copyright by next year.
