A digital rights organization has claimed to have harvested a vast number of songs from Spotify and is getting ready to publish them online.
Potential Impetus for AI Development
Industry experts said the seeming data breach could aid artificial intelligence firms looking for data to develop their models.
An entity called Anna’s Archive said it had scraped 86 million music files from the platform and 256 million rows of associated data such as performer and album names. The company, which hosts more than 100 million songs, confirmed that the breach did not constitute its full inventory.
“We have identified and deactivated the malicious user accounts that were involved in unlawful scraping,” said a Spotify representative.
The Swedish service, which has more than 700 million subscribers worldwide, added that an inquiry into unauthorized access found a external actor collected public metadata and employed illicit methods to bypass DRM [digital rights management].
Group's Stated Mission and Worries
The streaming service does not think the audio acquired by Anna’s Archive has been made public yet. Anna’s Archive, which is recognized for offering links to pirated books, said in a blog it wanted to create a ‘preservation archive’ for music.
The group asserted 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 start,” said Anna’s Archive, which frames its mission as “preserving humanity’s knowledge and heritage”.
Model Development and Copyright Debate
A composer and campaigner for protecting artists’ copyright, remarked the breached music would probably be used for developing artificial intelligence systems.
“Educating models on illegally sourced data is unfortunately widespread in the tech sector, so this accessed music is highly likely to end up training AI models,” he said.
The Anna’s Archive site alludes to a large online archive, a vast online archive of pirated books that has reportedly been leveraged by the parent company of Facebook to train its AI models.
A founder of an AI startup posted on LinkedIn that members of the public could in theory “build their own private free version of Spotify”. He added it could also allow technology firms to “educate models on contemporary music at scale”.
Intellectual property law has become a battleground between creatives, authors and creatives on one side and AI companies on the other.
Government Proposals and Reactions
Across Britain, creative professionals have protested against a government suggestion to let AI companies use protected work without consent unless the owner opts out. Almost every participant to a government call for evidence on the proposal has supported artists’ concerns.
A government minister for science, research and development informed parliament this month there was “little consensus” on the issue, adding that ministers would “take the time to get this correct”. The government has committed to make policy proposals on AI and copyright by next year.
