🔗 Share this article Activist Group Asserts to Have Extracted Countless of Audio Files from Spotify An activist organization has claimed to have scraped millions of tracks from Spotify and is getting ready to release them online. Possible Boost for AI Development Industry experts said the apparent data breach could aid AI companies looking for material to train their models. An entity known as Anna’s Archive said it had obtained 86 million audio tracks from Spotify and 256 million rows of associated data such as artist and record names. The company, which carries more than 100 million songs, confirmed that the breach did not constitute its full inventory. “We have identified and disabled the nefarious user accounts that were involved in unlawful scraping,” stated a Spotify representative. The Swedish company, which has more than 700 million subscribers worldwide, added that an inquiry into unauthorized access identified a third party collected public metadata and used illicit tactics to bypass DRM [digital rights management]. Group's Stated Goal and Concerns Spotify does not believe the audio taken by Anna’s Archive has been released yet. Anna’s Archive, which is recognized for offering links to copyright-infringing books, wrote in a blog it wanted to create a ‘preservation archive’ for music. The group asserted the music files represented 99.6% of all music listened to by Spotify users and would be shared via ‘peer-to-peer networks’, a means of sharing large data files online. “Of course the service doesn’t have all the music in the world, but it’s a fantastic beginning,” commented Anna’s Archive, which describes its mission as “preserving humanity’s information and culture”. AI Training and Copyright Debate A composer and campaigner for protecting artists’ rights, remarked the leaked music would probably be used for training artificial intelligence systems. “Educating models on pirated data is unfortunately widespread in the AI industry, so this accessed music is highly likely to be used training AI models,” he said. The Anna’s Archive site makes references to LibGen, a huge online repository of copyrighted books that has reportedly been used by the parent company of Facebook to train its systems. The co-founder of an AI startup wrote on LinkedIn that members of the public could in principle “create their own personal free equivalent of Spotify”. The executive added it could also enable technology firms to “train on contemporary music at a large volume”. Copyright has become a battleground between artists, authors and creatives on one side and tech giants on the other. Policy Proposals and Reactions Across Britain, artists and writers have protested against a government proposal to allow AI companies utilize protected work without permission unless the owner opts out. Virtually every participant to a government consultation on the idea has supported artists’ concerns. The secretary of state for science, research and technology told parliament this month there was “little consensus” on the matter, 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.