🔗 Share this article Activist Collective Asserts to Have Extracted Countless of Music Tracks from Spotify A digital rights organization has claimed to have harvested millions of tracks from Spotify and is getting ready to release them online. Potential Boost for AI Development Observers said the apparent data breach could aid artificial intelligence firms searching for data to train their models. A group known as Anna’s Archive said it had scraped 86 million music files from Spotify and 256 million rows of metadata such as performer and record names. Spotify, which carries more than 100 million tracks, stated that the breach did not represent its entire inventory. “We have located and disabled the nefarious user accounts that engaged in unlawful scraping,” said a Spotify representative. The Stockholm-based service, which has more than 700 million users worldwide, added that an inquiry into unauthorized access found a external actor collected public metadata and used questionable tactics to circumvent DRM [digital rights management]. Archive's Declared Mission and Worries The streaming service does not think the audio taken by Anna’s Archive has been released yet. Anna’s Archive, which is known for offering links to copyright-infringing 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 its listeners and would be distributed via ‘torrents’, 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,” commented Anna’s Archive, which describes its mission as “preserving humanity’s information and heritage”. AI Training and Copyright Battleground Ed Newton-Rex for protecting artists’ copyright, said the leaked music would probably be used for training AI models. “Training on illegally sourced material is sadly common in the tech sector, so this stolen music is highly likely to be used training AI models,” he said. The Anna’s Archive site alludes to a large online archive, a vast online archive of copyrighted books that has allegedly been used by the parent company of Facebook to train its systems. The co-founder of an artificial intelligence company wrote on LinkedIn that members of the public could in principle “create their own personal free equivalent of the service”. The executive added it could also enable technology firms to “train on contemporary music at a large volume”. Intellectual property law has emerged as a battleground between artists, authors and creatives on one side and AI companies on the other. Policy Considerations and Responses Across Britain, artists and writers have protested against a ministerial proposal to allow AI companies utilize protected work without permission unless the owner opts out. Almost every participant to a government call for evidence on the idea has supported artists’ apprehensions. A government minister for science, innovation and technology told parliament this month there was “no clear consensus” on the issue, noting that ministers would “use the time to get this correct”. The government has pledged to make regulatory plans on AI and copyright by next year.