A digital rights group has stated to have scraped millions of songs from Spotify and is preparing to publish them online.
Possible Boost for Artificial Intelligence Training
Observers noted the seeming leak could aid AI companies searching for material to develop their models.
An entity called Anna’s Archive reported it had scraped 86 million music files from Spotify and 256 million rows of metadata such as performer and album names. Spotify, which hosts more than 100 million tracks, confirmed that the leak did not constitute its entire inventory.
“We have located and disabled the nefarious user accounts that were involved in unlawful scraping,” said a company representative.
The Stockholm-based service, which has more than 700 million subscribers worldwide, added that an investigation into unauthorised access identified a external actor scraped public metadata and employed questionable methods to circumvent DRM protections.
Archive's Declared Mission and Worries
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 pirated books, said in a blog it wanted to create a ‘preservation archive’ for music.
They claimed the music files accounted for 99.6% of all music streamed to by its listeners and would be distributed via ‘peer-to-peer networks’, a means of exchanging large data 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 describes its mission as “preserving humanity’s information and heritage”.
AI Training and Intellectual Property Battleground
Ed Newton-Rex for protecting artists’ copyright, said the breached music would likely be used for training artificial intelligence systems.
“Educating models on illegally sourced data is unfortunately common in the AI industry, so this accessed music is almost certain to end up training AI models,” he said.
The Anna’s Archive site makes references to LibGen, a huge online archive of copyrighted books that has reportedly been used by Meta to develop its AI models.
A founder of an AI startup posted on LinkedIn that individuals of the public could in theory “build their own personal free equivalent of Spotify”. He added it could also allow technology firms to “educate models on contemporary music at scale”.
Intellectual property law has become a key issue between creatives, authors and content creators on one side and tech giants on the other.
Policy Proposals and Responses
Across Britain, creative professionals have protested against a government suggestion to allow AI companies use protected work without consent unless the rights holder opts out. Virtually every participant to a government consultation on the proposal has supported artists’ concerns.
The secretary of state for science, research and development informed parliament this month there was “little consensus” on the issue, adding that ministers would “use the time to get this right”. The administration has pledged to make policy proposals on AI and copyright by March 2025.
