Advocacy Group Claims to Have Extracted Millions of Music Tracks from Spotify
A digital rights organization has stated to have harvested a vast number of tracks from the popular streaming service and is getting ready to release them online.
Potential Impetus for Artificial Intelligence Development
Industry experts noted the apparent data breach could aid artificial intelligence firms looking for material to develop their models.
An entity called Anna’s Archive said it had scraped 86 million music files from Spotify and 256 million rows of associated data such as artist and album names. Spotify, which carries more than 100 million songs, confirmed that the breach did not constitute its full catalog.
“We have located and disabled the malicious user accounts that engaged in illegal scraping,” said a company spokesperson.
The Swedish service, which has more than 700 million subscribers worldwide, added that an investigation into unauthorized access found a external actor collected public metadata and used illicit methods to bypass DRM protections.
Group's Declared Mission and Concerns
Spotify does not believe the audio acquired by Anna’s Archive has been made public yet. Anna’s Archive, which is recognized for providing links to pirated books, wrote in a blog it wanted to create a ‘preservation archive’ for music.
They asserted the music files accounted for 99.6% of all music streamed to by Spotify users and would be distributed via ‘peer-to-peer networks’, a means of exchanging large digital 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 knowledge and heritage”.
Model Development and Copyright Debate
Ed Newton-Rex for defending artists’ rights, remarked the breached music would likely be utilized for developing artificial intelligence systems.
“Training on pirated data is sadly common in the AI industry, so this stolen music is almost certain to end up training AI models,” he said.
The group's website alludes to a large online archive, a huge online archive of copyrighted books that has reportedly been leveraged by the parent company of Facebook to develop its AI models.
The co-founder of an AI startup wrote on the professional network that members of the public could in principle “build their own personal free equivalent of the service”. He said it could also allow technology firms to “train on modern music at scale”.
Copyright has become a battleground between artists, writers and creatives on one side and AI companies on the other.
Government Proposals and Reactions
Across Britain, artists and writers have protested against a ministerial suggestion to let AI companies use protected work without consent unless the rights holder opts out. Almost every participant to a government consultation on the proposal has backed artists’ apprehensions.
A government minister for technology, research and technology informed parliament this month there was “no clear consensus” on the matter, adding that ministers would “take the time to get this right”. The administration has committed to make policy proposals on AI and copyright by next year.
