A digital rights group has claimed to have harvested a vast number of songs from the popular streaming service and is preparing to publish them online.
Possible Boost for AI Training
Observers said the apparent leak could aid AI companies looking for material to develop their models.
An entity called Anna’s Archive reported it had scraped 86 million music files from the platform and 256 million rows of associated data such as artist and record names. Spotify, which carries more than 100 million tracks, stated that the breach did not constitute its full inventory.
“We have located and disabled the nefarious user accounts that were involved in illegal scraping,” said a company representative.
The Stockholm-based company, which has more than 700 million users worldwide, further explained that an investigation into unauthorized access identified a external actor scraped public metadata and employed questionable methods to circumvent DRM protections.
Group's Stated Goal and Worries
The streaming service does not think the music acquired by Anna’s Archive has been made public yet. Anna’s Archive, which is recognized for providing links to pirated books, said in a blog it wanted to create a ‘historical repository’ for music.
They asserted the audio files accounted for 99.6% of all music streamed to by Spotify users and would be shared via ‘peer-to-peer networks’, a method of exchanging large digital files online.
“Of course Spotify doesn’t have all the music in the world, but it’s a fantastic start,” commented Anna’s Archive, which describes its purpose as “safeguarding humanity’s knowledge and heritage”.
Model Development and Copyright Battleground
A composer and campaigner for protecting artists’ copyright, said the leaked music would probably be used for developing artificial intelligence systems.
“Training on illegally sourced material is sadly widespread in the tech sector, so this stolen 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 repository of copyrighted books that has allegedly been used by the parent company of Facebook to train its systems.
The co-founder of an artificial intelligence company wrote on the professional network that individuals of the public could in theory “create their own personal free equivalent of the service”. The executive said it could also enable tech companies to “train on contemporary music at scale”.
Intellectual property law has become a battleground between creatives, writers and creatives on one side and AI companies on the other.
Government Proposals and Responses
In the UK, artists and writers have protested against a government proposal to let AI companies utilize copyright-protected work without permission unless the owner signals. Almost every respondent to a government call for evidence on the idea has supported artists’ apprehensions.
The secretary of state for science, research and technology told parliament this month there was “little consensus” on the issue, adding that ministers would “use the time to get this right”. The administration has committed to make regulatory plans on AI and copyright by March 2025.
