A digital rights group has claimed to have harvested millions of songs from the popular streaming service and is preparing to publish them publicly.
Possible Impetus for AI Training
Industry experts said the seeming data breach could aid artificial intelligence firms searching for material to develop their technology.
An entity known as Anna’s Archive reported it had scraped 86 million music files from Spotify and 256 million rows of associated data such as artist and album names. Spotify, which carries more than 100 million tracks, stated that the leak did not represent its full inventory.
“We have located and disabled the malicious user accounts that were involved in unlawful scraping,” stated a company spokesperson.
The Swedish company, which has more than 700 million subscribers worldwide, added that an investigation into unauthorised access identified a third party scraped public metadata and used questionable methods to circumvent DRM protections.
Group's Stated Goal and Concerns
The streaming service does not believe the audio taken by Anna’s Archive has been released yet. Anna’s Archive, which is recognized for providing links to pirated books, said in a blog it wanted to create a ‘historical repository’ for music.
The group claimed the music files accounted for 99.6% of all music streamed to by its listeners and would be shared via ‘peer-to-peer networks’, a means of sharing large digital files online.
“Of course the service doesn’t have all the music in the world, but it’s a great start,” said Anna’s Archive, which frames its mission as “preserving humanity’s information and culture”.
AI Training and Intellectual Property Battleground
Ed Newton-Rex for protecting artists’ rights, said the breached music would probably be utilized for developing AI models.
“Training on pirated data is sadly widespread in the AI industry, so this stolen music is highly likely to end up instructing AI models,” he said.
The group's website alludes to a large online archive, a vast online archive of pirated books that has reportedly been used by the parent company of Facebook to train its AI models.
A founder of an artificial intelligence company wrote on LinkedIn that members of the public could in principle “build their own private free equivalent of the service”. The executive added it could also enable tech companies to “train on contemporary music at scale”.
Intellectual property law has emerged as a key issue between creatives, writers and creatives on one side and AI companies on the other.
Government Considerations and Reactions
Across Britain, artists and writers have raised concerns against a ministerial proposal to allow AI companies utilize protected work without permission unless the owner signals. Virtually every respondent to a government consultation on the idea has backed artists’ concerns.
The secretary of state for technology, innovation and development told parliament this month there was “little consensus” on the matter, noting that ministers would “use the time to get this right”. The government has pledged to make regulatory plans on AI and copyright by next year.
