Advocacy Collective Claims to Have Scraped Countless of Music Tracks from Spotify
An activist group has stated to have scraped a vast number of tracks from Spotify and is getting ready to publish them online.
Potential Boost for AI Development
Industry experts said the apparent data breach could boost artificial intelligence firms searching for data to train their models.
An entity called Anna’s Archive said it had scraped 86 million audio tracks from the platform and 256 million rows of metadata such as performer and album names. Spotify, which hosts more than 100 million songs, stated that the leak did not constitute its entire catalog.
“We have located and disabled the nefarious user accounts that engaged in illegal scraping,” stated a Spotify representative.
The Swedish company, which has more than 700 million subscribers worldwide, further explained that an inquiry into unauthorised access found a external actor collected public metadata and used illicit methods to circumvent DRM [digital rights management].
Group's Stated Goal and Worries
The streaming service does not think the audio taken by Anna’s Archive has been made public yet. Anna’s Archive, which is recognized for offering links to copyright-infringing books, said in a blog it wanted to create a ‘preservation archive’ for music.
They asserted the audio files accounted for 99.6% of all music streamed to by Spotify users and would be shared via ‘torrents’, 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 frames its mission as “preserving humanity’s information and heritage”.
AI Training and Copyright Debate
A composer and campaigner for defending artists’ copyright, said the breached music would probably be used for training artificial intelligence systems.
“Educating models on illegally sourced data is sadly common in the tech sector, so this accessed music is almost certain to be used training AI models,” he stated.
The group's website alludes to a large online archive, a vast online archive of pirated books that has reportedly been leveraged by the parent company of Facebook to develop its systems.
The co-founder of an artificial intelligence company posted on LinkedIn that individuals of the public could in theory “build their own private free version of Spotify”. He said it could also enable technology firms to “train on modern music at a large volume”.
Intellectual property law has become a battleground between creatives, authors and creatives on one side and tech giants on the other.
Government Proposals and Responses
Across Britain, artists and writers have raised concerns against a government suggestion to allow AI companies utilize protected work without permission unless the owner opts out. Virtually every respondent to a government consultation on the proposal has supported artists’ concerns.
A government minister for science, research and technology told parliament this month there was “no clear consensus” on the issue, noting that ministers would “use the time to get this correct”. The administration has pledged to make policy proposals on AI and copyright by March 2025.
