A digital rights organization has claimed to have scraped a vast number of tracks from Spotify and is preparing to publish them online.
Potential Boost for Artificial Intelligence Training
Observers said the seeming leak could aid artificial intelligence firms looking for material to develop their technology.
A group called Anna’s Archive reported it had scraped 86 million music files from Spotify and 256 million rows of associated data such as artist and album names. The company, which hosts more than 100 million songs, confirmed that the leak did not represent its entire catalog.
“We have identified and disabled the malicious user accounts that were involved in unlawful scraping,” said a Spotify spokesperson.
The Swedish company, which has more than 700 million subscribers worldwide, further explained that an inquiry into unauthorised access found a external actor scraped public metadata and used illicit methods to bypass DRM protections.
Group's Stated Goal and Concerns
The streaming service does not believe the music taken by Anna’s Archive has been made public yet. Anna’s Archive, which is recognized for providing links to pirated books, said in a blog it wanted to create a ‘historical repository’ for music.
The group asserted the music files accounted for 99.6% of all music listened to by Spotify users and would be shared via ‘peer-to-peer networks’, a method of sharing large data files online.
“Naturally the service doesn’t have all the music in the world, but it’s a fantastic start,” said Anna’s Archive, which describes its mission as “preserving humanity’s knowledge and culture”.
AI Training and Intellectual Property Battleground
A composer and campaigner for defending artists’ copyright, said the breached music would probably be used for developing artificial intelligence systems.
“Educating models on illegally sourced material is unfortunately common in the AI industry, so this stolen music is highly likely to end up instructing AI models,” he stated.
The Anna’s Archive site makes references to a large online archive, a vast online repository of copyrighted books that has allegedly been used by the parent company of Facebook to train its AI models.
A founder of an artificial intelligence company wrote on LinkedIn that individuals of the public could in principle “build their own private free equivalent of the service”. He said it could also enable tech companies to “educate models on modern music at a large volume”.
Intellectual property law has become a key issue between artists, writers and content creators on one side and AI companies on the other.
Policy Proposals and Responses
In the UK, creative professionals have protested against a ministerial proposal to let AI companies use protected work without permission unless the rights holder signals. Almost every respondent to a government consultation on the idea has supported artists’ concerns.
A government minister for technology, innovation and development informed parliament this month there was “little consensus” on the matter, adding that ministers would “take the time to get this right”. The government has committed to make regulatory plans on AI and copyright by March 2025.
