An activist organization has stated to have harvested a vast number of tracks from the popular streaming service and is preparing to release them online.
Potential Impetus for Artificial Intelligence Training
Industry experts said the seeming leak could boost AI companies searching for data to train their technology.
An entity called Anna’s Archive said it had obtained 86 million music files from the platform and 256 million rows of associated data such as performer and record names. Spotify, which hosts more than 100 million songs, stated that the leak did not constitute its full catalog.
“We have identified and disabled the malicious user accounts that were involved in illegal scraping,” said a Spotify representative.
The Stockholm-based service, which has more than 700 million users worldwide, further explained that an inquiry into unauthorized access found a third party collected public metadata and used questionable methods to bypass DRM [digital rights management].
Archive's Stated Goal and Concerns
Spotify does not believe the music acquired 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 asserted the music files represented 99.6% of all music listened to by Spotify users and would be distributed via ‘torrents’, a means of exchanging large data files online.
“Of course the service doesn’t have all the music in the world, but it’s a great start,” commented Anna’s Archive, which describes its mission as “safeguarding humanity’s information and culture”.
AI Training and Intellectual Property Debate
Ed Newton-Rex for protecting artists’ rights, remarked the breached music would probably be used for training artificial intelligence systems.
“Training on illegally sourced material is unfortunately common in the tech sector, so this stolen music is almost certain to end up training AI models,” he said.
The Anna’s Archive site alludes to a large online archive, a vast online repository of copyrighted books that has allegedly been used by the parent company of Facebook to train its AI models.
The co-founder of an AI startup posted on the professional network that members of the public could in principle “create their own personal free equivalent of the service”. The executive added it could also enable technology firms to “train on contemporary music at scale”.
Copyright has become a key issue between creatives, writers and content creators on one side and AI companies on the other.
Policy Considerations and Reactions
Across Britain, artists and writers have raised concerns against a government suggestion to let AI companies utilize protected work without permission unless the rights holder signals. Virtually every respondent to a government consultation on the idea has supported artists’ apprehensions.
A government minister for science, research and development informed parliament this month there was “little consensus” on the matter, noting that ministers would “take the time to get this correct”. The government has pledged to make policy proposals on AI and copyright by next year.
