🔗 Share this article Activist Collective Asserts to Have Scraped Countless of Audio Tracks from the Streaming Giant A digital rights organization has stated to have harvested millions of tracks from the popular streaming service and is preparing to publish them publicly. Possible Boost for AI Development Industry experts said the apparent leak could aid AI companies looking for material to train their technology. A group known as Anna’s Archive reported it had obtained 86 million music files from the platform and 256 million entries of metadata such as artist and record names. The company, which hosts more than 100 million songs, confirmed that the breach did not represent its full inventory. “We have located and disabled the nefarious user accounts that were involved in unlawful scraping,” said a Spotify representative. The Stockholm-based service, which has more than 700 million users worldwide, further explained that an inquiry into unauthorized access found a external actor scraped public metadata and used illicit tactics to circumvent DRM [digital rights management]. Archive's Stated Goal and Worries The streaming service does not believe the audio acquired by Anna’s Archive has been made public yet. Anna’s Archive, which is recognized for providing links to pirated books, wrote in a blog it wanted to create a ‘preservation archive’ for music. The group claimed the music files represented 99.6% of all music streamed to by its listeners and would be distributed via ‘peer-to-peer networks’, a method of exchanging large data files online. “Naturally Spotify doesn’t have all the music in the world, but it’s a great beginning,” said Anna’s Archive, which describes its purpose as “preserving humanity’s knowledge and heritage”. AI Training and Copyright Debate Ed Newton-Rex for defending artists’ rights, remarked the leaked music would probably be used for training artificial intelligence systems. “Training on illegally sourced data is unfortunately widespread in the AI industry, so this accessed music is almost certain to be used instructing AI models,” he stated. The group's website makes references to a large online archive, a huge online repository of pirated books that has allegedly been leveraged by the parent company of Facebook to develop its systems. A founder of an artificial intelligence company posted on the professional network that members of the public could in theory “create their own personal free equivalent of the service”. The executive added it could also enable tech companies to “train on modern music at a large volume”. Copyright has become a battleground between creatives, authors and content creators on one side and AI companies on the other. Government Considerations and Reactions Across Britain, artists and writers have raised concerns against a ministerial suggestion to let AI companies use copyright-protected work without permission unless the owner signals. Almost every participant to a government call for evidence on the idea has backed artists’ apprehensions. A government minister for technology, innovation and technology told parliament this month there was “little consensus” on the issue, noting that ministers would “use the time to get this right”. The government has pledged to make policy proposals on AI and copyright by next year.