An activist group has stated to have harvested a vast number of tracks from the popular streaming service and is preparing to publish them online.
Potential Impetus for Artificial Intelligence Development
Industry experts noted the apparent leak could aid artificial intelligence firms searching for material to train their models.
A group known as Anna’s Archive said it had scraped 86 million music files from the platform and 256 million rows of metadata such as artist and record names. The company, which hosts more than 100 million songs, stated that the leak did not represent its full catalog.
“We have located and disabled the malicious user accounts that were involved in unlawful scraping,” stated a company spokesperson.
The Swedish company, which has more than 700 million subscribers worldwide, added that an inquiry into unauthorized access found a third party scraped public metadata and employed questionable tactics to circumvent DRM [digital rights management].
Group's Declared Goal and Concerns
The streaming service does not think the music taken 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 asserted the audio files accounted for 99.6% of all music listened to by its listeners and would be shared 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 fantastic start,” commented Anna’s Archive, which frames its mission as “preserving humanity’s information and culture”.
Model Development and Intellectual Property Battleground
A composer and campaigner for defending artists’ copyright, said the leaked music would probably be utilized for training AI models.
“Educating models on illegally sourced material is unfortunately common in the tech sector, so this stolen music is highly likely to be used training AI models,” he said.
The group's website alludes to LibGen, a vast online repository of copyrighted books that has allegedly been leveraged by the parent company of Facebook to develop its systems.
The co-founder of an artificial intelligence company wrote on the professional network that individuals of the public could in principle “create their own personal free equivalent of Spotify”. He added it could also enable tech companies to “educate models on modern music at scale”.
Copyright has become a battleground between creatives, writers and creatives on one side and AI companies on the other.
Policy Considerations and Reactions
In the UK, creative professionals have raised concerns against a government suggestion to allow AI companies use protected work without consent unless the rights holder signals. Virtually every respondent to a government consultation on the idea has backed artists’ concerns.
A government minister for science, research and development informed parliament this month there was “little consensus” on the issue, adding that ministers would “take the time to get this right”. The government has committed to make regulatory plans on AI and copyright by next year.
