Advocacy Collective Claims to Have Extracted Countless of Audio Files from Spotify
An activist group has stated to have scraped millions of songs from Spotify and is getting ready to release them online.
Potential Impetus for AI Development
Observers said the apparent leak could aid artificial intelligence firms looking for data to train their models.
An entity known as Anna’s Archive said it had scraped 86 million music files from the platform and 256 million rows of associated data such as artist and album names. The company, which carries more than 100 million tracks, confirmed that the breach did not constitute its entire inventory.
“We have located and disabled the malicious user accounts that were involved in unlawful scraping,” said a Spotify spokesperson.
The Stockholm-based service, which has more than 700 million subscribers worldwide, further explained that an inquiry into unauthorized access identified a third party collected public metadata and used illicit tactics to circumvent DRM protections.
Group's Declared Goal and Worries
The streaming service does not believe the music acquired by Anna’s Archive has been released yet. Anna’s Archive, which is recognized for providing links to copyright-infringing books, said in a blog it wanted to create a ‘historical repository’ for music.
They asserted the audio files represented 99.6% of all music streamed to by Spotify users and would be shared via ‘torrents’, a method of sharing large data files online.
“Naturally Spotify doesn’t have all the music in the world, but it’s a fantastic start,” commented Anna’s Archive, which frames its purpose as “preserving humanity’s information and culture”.
AI Training and Copyright Battleground
A composer and campaigner for protecting artists’ copyright, remarked the breached music would likely be used for developing AI models.
“Educating models on illegally sourced data is unfortunately common in the AI industry, so this stolen music is highly likely to end up training AI models,” he said.
The Anna’s Archive site makes references to a large online archive, a huge online repository of copyrighted books that has allegedly been used by the parent company of Facebook to train its AI models.
The co-founder of an AI startup posted on the professional network that individuals of the public could in theory “create their own private free version of the service”. He added it could also allow tech companies to “train on modern music at a large volume”.
Intellectual property law has emerged as a battleground between artists, authors and content creators on one side and tech giants on the other.
Policy Considerations and Responses
In the UK, artists and writers have raised concerns against a government proposal to let AI companies use copyright-protected work without permission unless the rights holder opts out. Almost every respondent to a government call for evidence on the idea has backed artists’ apprehensions.
The secretary of state for science, research and development informed parliament this month there was “no clear consensus” on the matter, noting that ministers would “use the time to get this correct”. The administration has pledged to make regulatory plans on AI and copyright by March 2025.
