A digital rights organization has stated to have harvested a vast number of tracks from Spotify and is preparing to release them online.
Possible Impetus for Artificial Intelligence Development
Observers said the seeming data breach could boost artificial intelligence firms looking for data to develop their technology.
A group called Anna’s Archive said it had obtained 86 million audio tracks from Spotify and 256 million rows of metadata such as artist and album names. Spotify, which hosts more than 100 million songs, confirmed that the breach did not constitute its entire inventory.
“We have located and disabled the nefarious user accounts that engaged in illegal scraping,” stated a Spotify spokesperson.
The Swedish company, which has more than 700 million subscribers worldwide, further explained that an inquiry into unauthorised access found a third party collected public metadata and employed questionable methods to bypass DRM protections.
Group's Stated Goal and Worries
The streaming service does not think the music acquired by Anna’s Archive has been released yet. Anna’s Archive, which is known for offering links to copyright-infringing books, wrote in a blog it wanted to create a ‘historical repository’ for music.
They claimed the music files represented 99.6% of all music streamed to by its listeners and would be distributed via ‘torrents’, a method of exchanging large digital files online.
“Naturally Spotify doesn’t have all the music in the world, but it’s a fantastic beginning,” said Anna’s Archive, which frames its purpose as “preserving humanity’s information and heritage”.
AI Training and Copyright Debate
A composer and campaigner for defending artists’ copyright, said the leaked music would probably be utilized 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 be used training AI models,” he said.
The Anna’s Archive site alludes to a large online archive, a huge online archive of copyrighted books that has allegedly been leveraged by the parent company of Facebook to train its systems.
The co-founder of an artificial intelligence company posted on LinkedIn that members of the public could in principle “create their own personal free equivalent of Spotify”. He added it could also allow technology firms to “train on contemporary music at scale”.
Intellectual property law has emerged as a key issue between creatives, writers and creatives on one side and AI companies on the other.
Government Considerations and Responses
Across Britain, artists and writers have protested against a ministerial suggestion to allow AI companies utilize copyright-protected work without permission unless the rights holder opts out. Almost every participant to a government call for evidence on the idea has backed artists’ concerns.
The secretary of state for technology, innovation and technology informed parliament this month there was “little consensus” on the matter, noting that ministers would “take the time to get this right”. The administration has pledged to make policy proposals on AI and copyright by next year.
