A digital rights organization has stated to have harvested a vast number of tracks from Spotify and is preparing to release them publicly.
Possible Impetus for Artificial Intelligence Development
Observers said the seeming data breach could aid artificial intelligence firms looking for material to develop their technology.
An entity called Anna’s Archive said it had obtained 86 million music files from Spotify and 256 million entries of associated data such as artist and album names. The company, which hosts more than 100 million songs, stated that the leak did not represent its entire catalog.
“We have located and deactivated the malicious user accounts that were involved in unlawful scraping,” said a Spotify representative.
The Stockholm-based company, which has more than 700 million subscribers worldwide, further explained that an inquiry into unauthorized access identified a third party scraped public metadata and employed questionable tactics to circumvent DRM protections.
Group's Declared Mission and Worries
Spotify does not think the music acquired by Anna’s Archive has been released yet. Anna’s Archive, which is known for providing links to pirated books, said in a blog it wanted to create a ‘preservation archive’ for music.
The group asserted the music files accounted for 99.6% of all music listened to by its listeners and would be distributed via ‘torrents’, a method of exchanging large digital files online.
“Naturally the service doesn’t have all the music in the world, but it’s a fantastic start,” said Anna’s Archive, which describes its purpose as “safeguarding humanity’s knowledge and heritage”.
Model Development and Intellectual Property Debate
A composer and campaigner for defending artists’ copyright, said the breached music would likely be used for training artificial intelligence systems.
“Educating models on illegally sourced material is sadly common in the AI industry, so this stolen music is almost certain to end up training AI models,” he stated.
The group's website makes references to a large online archive, a vast online archive of pirated books that has allegedly 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 theory “build their own private free version of the service”. The executive said it could also allow tech companies to “educate models on modern music at a large volume”.
Intellectual property law has emerged as a key issue between creatives, authors and creatives on one side and AI companies on the other.
Policy Proposals and Responses
In the UK, artists and writers have protested against a ministerial suggestion to let AI companies use protected work without consent unless the rights holder signals. Virtually every participant to a government call for evidence on the proposal has supported artists’ apprehensions.
A government minister for science, innovation and technology informed parliament this month there was “no clear consensus” on the matter, noting that ministers would “use the time to get this correct”. The government has pledged to make policy proposals on AI and copyright by next year.
