An activist group has claimed to have scraped a vast number of songs from Spotify and is getting ready to release them publicly.
Potential Impetus for AI Development
Observers said the apparent leak could aid AI companies searching for data to develop their technology.
An entity called Anna’s Archive reported it had scraped 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 songs, confirmed that the leak did not represent its full inventory.
“We have identified and deactivated the malicious user accounts that engaged in unlawful scraping,” said a Spotify spokesperson.
The Swedish company, which has more than 700 million subscribers worldwide, added that an investigation into unauthorized access identified a external actor collected public metadata and employed questionable methods to circumvent DRM [digital rights management].
Archive's Stated Goal and Concerns
The streaming service does not think the music taken by Anna’s Archive has been released yet. Anna’s Archive, which is recognized for offering links to pirated books, said in a blog it wanted to create a ‘historical repository’ for music.
They claimed the audio files accounted for 99.6% of all music streamed to by its listeners and would be shared via ‘torrents’, a means of sharing large digital 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 purpose as “preserving humanity’s information and heritage”.
Model Development and Intellectual Property Battleground
A composer and campaigner for defending artists’ copyright, said the leaked music would likely be used for training artificial intelligence systems.
“Educating models on illegally sourced material is unfortunately common in the AI industry, so this accessed music is highly likely to be used training AI models,” he stated.
The group's website alludes to a large online archive, a vast online archive of copyrighted books that has reportedly been leveraged by the parent company of Facebook to train its systems.
A founder of an artificial intelligence company wrote on the professional network that individuals of the public could in principle “build their own private free equivalent of the service”. The executive said it could also enable tech companies to “train on modern music at scale”.
Copyright has emerged as a battleground between artists, authors and content creators on one side and tech giants on the other.
Policy Considerations and Reactions
Across Britain, artists and writers have raised concerns against a government proposal to allow AI companies use copyright-protected work without permission unless the owner opts out. Almost every participant to a government consultation on the proposal has backed artists’ concerns.
A government minister for science, research and development told parliament this month there was “no clear consensus” on the issue, noting that ministers would “take the time to get this right”. The administration has committed to make regulatory plans on AI and copyright by next year.
