Activist Group Claims to Have Scraped Millions of Audio Tracks from Spotify
An activist group has stated to have harvested millions of songs from the popular streaming service and is preparing to publish them publicly.
Possible Impetus for AI Development
Industry experts noted the apparent data breach could aid artificial intelligence firms looking for material to train their models.
An entity known as Anna’s Archive said it had scraped 86 million audio tracks from the platform and 256 million entries of metadata such as performer and album names. The company, which hosts more than 100 million songs, stated that the breach did not constitute its full inventory.
“We have located and disabled the nefarious user accounts that engaged in illegal scraping,” said a company spokesperson.
The Stockholm-based service, which has more than 700 million users worldwide, added that an inquiry into unauthorised access found a third party collected public metadata and employed illicit methods to circumvent DRM [digital rights management].
Group's Declared Goal and Worries
Spotify does not believe the audio acquired by Anna’s Archive has been made public yet. Anna’s Archive, which is recognized for providing links to copyright-infringing books, said in a blog it wanted to create a ‘preservation archive’ for music.
They claimed the audio files represented 99.6% of all music streamed to by its listeners and would be distributed via ‘torrents’, a means of exchanging large digital 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 information and culture”.
AI Training and Intellectual Property Debate
Ed Newton-Rex for protecting artists’ copyright, remarked the breached music would probably be utilized for developing AI models.
“Educating models on illegally sourced data is unfortunately widespread in the tech sector, so this stolen music is almost certain to end up instructing AI models,” he said.
The Anna’s Archive site makes references to a large online archive, a huge online repository of copyrighted books that has allegedly been used by the parent company of Facebook to train its systems.
The co-founder of an AI startup wrote on the professional network that individuals of the public could in theory “create their own personal free equivalent of Spotify”. The executive added it could also allow technology firms to “train on modern music at scale”.
Intellectual property law has become a key issue between artists, authors and content creators on one side and AI companies on the other.
Government Proposals and Responses
Across Britain, creative professionals have raised concerns against a government proposal to allow AI companies utilize copyright-protected work without consent unless the owner signals. Virtually every respondent to a government call for evidence on the proposal has supported artists’ apprehensions.
The secretary of state for technology, research and development informed parliament this month there was “no clear consensus” on the matter, adding that ministers would “use the time to get this correct”. The administration has committed to make regulatory plans on AI and copyright by next year.
