An activist organization has stated to have scraped millions of songs from Spotify and is preparing to publish them publicly.
Potential Impetus for AI Development
Observers noted the apparent data breach could aid AI companies looking for material to train their models.
An entity called Anna’s Archive reported it had obtained 86 million audio tracks from the platform and 256 million rows of associated data such as artist and album names. The company, which carries more than 100 million tracks, confirmed that the leak did not represent its full catalog.
“We have identified and disabled the nefarious user accounts that were involved in illegal scraping,” said a company representative.
The Stockholm-based company, which has more than 700 million users worldwide, further explained that an investigation into unauthorised access found a external actor collected public metadata and used illicit tactics to bypass DRM [digital rights management].
Group's Stated Mission and Concerns
The streaming service does not believe the audio taken by Anna’s Archive has been made public yet. Anna’s Archive, which is known for providing links to pirated books, said in a blog it wanted to create a ‘preservation archive’ for music.
They claimed the audio files accounted for 99.6% of all music listened to by Spotify users and would be shared via ‘torrents’, a method of exchanging large data 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 mission as “safeguarding humanity’s information and heritage”.
AI Training and Copyright Debate
A composer and campaigner for protecting artists’ copyright, said the breached music would probably be utilized for training artificial intelligence systems.
“Educating models on illegally sourced material is unfortunately common in the tech sector, so this accessed music is almost certain to end up instructing AI models,” he stated.
The group's website alludes to a large online archive, a huge online archive of pirated books that has allegedly been used by Meta to develop its AI models.
A founder of an artificial intelligence company wrote on the professional network that members of the public could in theory “create their own personal free equivalent of the service”. He said it could also allow technology firms to “educate models on modern music at a large volume”.
Copyright has emerged as a key issue between artists, writers and content creators on one side and AI companies on the other.
Government Proposals and Reactions
In the UK, creative professionals have protested against a ministerial proposal to let AI companies use copyright-protected work without consent unless the owner signals. Almost every participant to a government call for evidence on the idea has backed artists’ concerns.
A government minister for science, innovation and technology told parliament this month there was “little consensus” on the matter, noting that ministers would “take the time to get this correct”. The administration has pledged to make regulatory plans on AI and copyright by next year.
