Activist Collective Claims to Have Scraped Countless of Music Tracks from the Streaming Giant
An activist organization has claimed to have harvested a vast number of songs from Spotify and is preparing to release them online.
Possible Impetus for AI Training
Observers said the seeming leak could aid AI companies searching for data to train their models.
An entity known as Anna’s Archive said it had scraped 86 million audio tracks from the platform and 256 million entries of associated data such as artist and record names. The company, which carries more than 100 million songs, stated that the leak did not represent its full catalog.
“We have located and disabled the malicious user accounts that engaged in illegal scraping,” said a company representative.
The Swedish company, which has more than 700 million subscribers worldwide, added that an inquiry into unauthorised access found a external actor collected public metadata and used illicit methods to circumvent DRM [digital rights management].
Archive's Stated Goal and Concerns
Spotify does not think the audio acquired by Anna’s Archive has been made public yet. Anna’s Archive, which is known for offering links to copyright-infringing books, said in a blog it wanted to create a ‘preservation archive’ for music.
The group claimed the audio files accounted for 99.6% of all music streamed to by Spotify users and would be distributed via ‘torrents’, a method of sharing large data files online.
“Naturally the service doesn’t have all the music in the world, but it’s a fantastic start,” commented Anna’s Archive, which describes its mission as “safeguarding humanity’s information and heritage”.
AI Training and Intellectual Property Debate
A composer and campaigner for defending artists’ rights, remarked the leaked music would likely be utilized for training artificial intelligence systems.
“Educating models on pirated data is unfortunately common in the tech sector, so this accessed music is highly likely to be used instructing AI models,” he stated.
The group's website makes references to a large online archive, a vast online archive of copyrighted books that has allegedly been used by the parent company of Facebook to develop its systems.
A founder of an AI startup posted on LinkedIn that individuals of the public could in principle “create their own private free version of Spotify”. He said it could also enable technology firms to “train on contemporary music at a large volume”.
Intellectual property law has emerged as a battleground between creatives, writers and creatives on one side and tech giants on the other.
Government Considerations and Reactions
In the UK, artists and writers have raised concerns against a government proposal to allow AI companies use protected work without permission unless the rights holder signals. Almost every respondent 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 “little consensus” on the issue, noting that ministers would “use the time to get this right”. The administration has committed to make policy proposals on AI and copyright by next year.
