A digital rights organization has stated to have scraped millions of songs from Spotify and is getting ready to release them online.
Possible Boost for Artificial Intelligence Development
Industry experts said the seeming leak could boost artificial intelligence firms looking for data to develop their models.
An entity known as Anna’s Archive said it had scraped 86 million audio tracks from Spotify and 256 million rows of metadata such as artist and album names. The company, which carries more than 100 million songs, stated 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 Stockholm-based company, which has more than 700 million users worldwide, added that an investigation into unauthorized access found a third party collected public metadata and employed questionable tactics to bypass DRM protections.
Group's Stated Mission and Concerns
Spotify does not believe the music acquired by Anna’s Archive has been released yet. Anna’s Archive, which is known for providing links to pirated books, wrote in a blog it wanted to create a ‘historical repository’ for music.
The group asserted the music files accounted for 99.6% of all music streamed to by Spotify users and would be shared via ‘torrents’, a means of sharing 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 frames its mission as “preserving humanity’s information and heritage”.
Model Development and Intellectual Property Battleground
A composer and campaigner for protecting artists’ copyright, remarked the breached music would likely be used for training artificial intelligence systems.
“Training on pirated data is sadly widespread in the tech sector, so this accessed music is highly likely to end up instructing AI models,” he said.
The group's website alludes to a large online archive, a huge online archive of pirated books that has allegedly been used by the parent company of Facebook to train its AI models.
The co-founder of an artificial intelligence company wrote on the professional network that individuals of the public could in theory “build their own personal free version of the service”. The executive added it could also enable tech companies to “educate models on modern music at scale”.
Intellectual property law has become a key issue between artists, writers and content creators on one side and tech giants on the other.
Policy Considerations and Responses
Across Britain, creative professionals have protested against a government suggestion to let AI companies use protected work without consent unless the rights holder opts out. Virtually every respondent to a government call for evidence on the idea has backed artists’ apprehensions.
A government minister for technology, innovation and technology told parliament this month there was “no clear consensus” on the matter, noting that ministers would “take the time to get this right”. The government has pledged to make regulatory plans on AI and copyright by next year.
