Activist Collective Claims to Have Scraped Countless of Music Tracks from the Streaming Giant
An activist group has claimed to have harvested a vast number of songs from the popular streaming service and is getting ready to release them online.
Potential Impetus for AI Development
Observers noted the seeming data breach could aid AI companies searching for material to train their technology.
A group known as Anna’s Archive said it had scraped 86 million music files from Spotify and 256 million entries of metadata such as artist and album names. Spotify, which hosts more than 100 million tracks, confirmed that the breach did not constitute its full inventory.
“We have identified and deactivated the nefarious user accounts that were involved in illegal scraping,” stated a company representative.
The Swedish company, which has more than 700 million users worldwide, added that an investigation into unauthorized access found a third party scraped public metadata and employed questionable tactics to bypass DRM protections.
Archive's Declared Mission and Concerns
Spotify does not believe the audio taken by Anna’s Archive has been released yet. Anna’s Archive, which is known for providing links to copyright-infringing books, wrote in a blog it wanted to create a ‘preservation archive’ for music.
The group claimed the audio files represented 99.6% of all music streamed to by Spotify users and would be shared via ‘torrents’, a means of exchanging large digital files online.
“Naturally the service doesn’t have all the music in the world, but it’s a great start,” commented Anna’s Archive, which frames its mission as “preserving humanity’s information and heritage”.
AI Training and Intellectual Property Debate
A composer and campaigner for defending artists’ rights, said the leaked music would probably be utilized for developing artificial intelligence systems.
“Training on illegally sourced material is sadly widespread 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 huge 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 wrote on the professional network that individuals of the public could in principle “create their own personal free version of Spotify”. He said it could also enable technology firms to “educate models on modern music at scale”.
Copyright has become a battleground between artists, writers and creatives on one side and tech giants on the other.
Policy Considerations and Responses
Across Britain, artists and writers have raised concerns against a government suggestion to allow AI companies utilize protected work without permission unless the owner signals. Almost every participant to a government consultation on the proposal has backed artists’ concerns.
A government minister for technology, research and technology informed parliament this month there was “little consensus” on the matter, adding that ministers would “use the time to get this right”. The government has pledged to make policy proposals on AI and copyright by next year.
