A digital rights group has claimed to have harvested millions of songs from Spotify and is preparing to publish them online.
Possible Impetus for Artificial Intelligence Development
Observers said the apparent leak could aid artificial intelligence firms searching for material to develop their technology.
An entity called Anna’s Archive said it had scraped 86 million music files from Spotify and 256 million entries of associated data such as performer and album names. Spotify, which hosts more than 100 million tracks, stated that the breach did not constitute its entire inventory.
“We have located and disabled the malicious user accounts that engaged in illegal scraping,” stated a company representative.
The Swedish company, which has more than 700 million subscribers worldwide, added that an investigation into unauthorized access identified a third party scraped public metadata and employed questionable methods to bypass DRM [digital rights management].
Group's Stated Goal and Concerns
The streaming service does not believe the audio acquired 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 ‘historical repository’ for music.
They claimed the audio files accounted for 99.6% of all music streamed to by Spotify users and would be shared via ‘torrents’, a method of exchanging large data files online.
“Naturally Spotify doesn’t have all the music in the world, but it’s a great beginning,” commented Anna’s Archive, which describes its purpose as “safeguarding humanity’s information and heritage”.
AI Training and Copyright Debate
Ed Newton-Rex for defending artists’ rights, said the leaked music would likely be used for developing AI models.
“Educating models on illegally sourced data is sadly common in the AI industry, so this stolen music is highly likely to be used training AI models,” he stated.
The Anna’s Archive site alludes to LibGen, a huge online archive of copyrighted books that has allegedly been used by the parent company of Facebook to train its systems.
A founder of an artificial intelligence company posted on the professional network that members of the public could in principle “build their own private free equivalent of the service”. He said it could also enable technology firms to “train on modern music at a large volume”.
Intellectual property law has become a key issue between artists, authors and content creators on one side and tech giants on the other.
Policy Proposals and Reactions
Across Britain, artists and writers have protested against a government proposal to let AI companies use copyright-protected work without consent unless the rights holder opts out. Almost every participant to a government call for evidence on the proposal has supported artists’ concerns.
A government minister for technology, innovation and development informed parliament this month there was “little consensus” on the matter, noting that ministers would “use the time to get this correct”. The government has committed to make regulatory plans on AI and copyright by March 2025.
