🔗 Share this article Advocacy Group Claims to Have Scraped Countless of Music Files from the Streaming Giant A digital rights group has claimed to have harvested a vast number of songs from Spotify and is getting ready to release them publicly. Possible Boost for Artificial Intelligence Training Observers said the apparent leak could boost artificial intelligence firms searching for data to train their models. An entity called Anna’s Archive reported it had obtained 86 million audio tracks from the platform and 256 million entries of metadata such as artist and album names. Spotify, which carries more than 100 million songs, stated that the breach did not constitute its full inventory. “We have located and disabled the malicious user accounts that engaged in illegal scraping,” said a Spotify representative. The Stockholm-based service, which has more than 700 million subscribers worldwide, added that an inquiry into unauthorised access found a external actor scraped public metadata and employed illicit tactics to bypass DRM [digital rights management]. Group's Declared Goal and Concerns 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 pirated books, wrote in a blog it wanted to create a ‘historical repository’ for music. The group asserted the audio files accounted for 99.6% of all music streamed to by Spotify users and would be distributed via ‘torrents’, a method of exchanging large data files online. “Of course Spotify doesn’t have all the music in the world, but it’s a great beginning,” said Anna’s Archive, which describes its mission as “safeguarding humanity’s knowledge and heritage”. Model Development and Intellectual Property Debate A composer and campaigner for defending artists’ rights, remarked the breached music would likely be used for training artificial intelligence systems. “Educating models on pirated material is sadly common in the tech sector, so this accessed music is highly likely to be used training AI models,” he said. The group's website alludes to a large online archive, a vast online archive of copyrighted books that has allegedly been used by Meta to train its AI models. The co-founder of an artificial intelligence company wrote on LinkedIn that individuals of the public could in theory “build their own personal free version of the service”. He said it could also enable technology firms to “train on modern music at scale”. Copyright has emerged as a key issue between artists, writers and creatives on one side and tech giants on the other. Policy Proposals and Responses In the UK, creative professionals have raised concerns against a government suggestion to let AI companies utilize copyright-protected work without permission unless the owner opts out. Almost every participant to a government call for evidence on the idea has supported artists’ concerns. A government minister for technology, innovation and technology told parliament this month there was “no clear consensus” on the issue, adding that ministers would “use the time to get this correct”. The government has pledged to make policy proposals on AI and copyright by next year.