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An activist group has claimed to have scraped a vast number of songs from the popular streaming service and is getting ready to publish them online.

Potential Impetus for Artificial Intelligence Training

Observers noted the apparent leak could boost AI companies searching for material to train their technology.

An entity known as Anna’s Archive reported it had obtained 86 million audio tracks from the platform and 256 million entries of metadata such as artist and record names. Spotify, which carries more than 100 million tracks, confirmed that the leak did not represent its entire catalog.

“We have located and deactivated the malicious user accounts that engaged in illegal scraping,” stated a company spokesperson.

The Swedish service, which has more than 700 million subscribers worldwide, further explained that an investigation into unauthorized access identified a third party collected public metadata and employed illicit methods to circumvent DRM [digital rights management].

Group's Declared Goal and Concerns

The streaming service does not believe the music taken by Anna’s Archive has been made public yet. Anna’s Archive, which is known for offering links to pirated books, said in a blog it wanted to create a ‘historical repository’ for music.

The group claimed the audio files accounted for 99.6% of all music listened to by its listeners and would be shared via ‘torrents’, a means of sharing large data files online.

“Naturally Spotify doesn’t have all the music in the world, but it’s a fantastic beginning,” said Anna’s Archive, which frames its mission as “safeguarding humanity’s knowledge and culture”.

Model Development and Intellectual Property Debate

A composer and campaigner for defending artists’ copyright, remarked the breached music would probably be utilized for training artificial intelligence systems.

“Training on pirated material is sadly common in the tech sector, so this accessed music is almost certain to be used training AI models,” he said.

The Anna’s Archive site alludes to a large online archive, a huge online archive of copyrighted books that has allegedly been used by the parent company of Facebook to develop its AI models.

The co-founder of an artificial intelligence company wrote on the professional network that members of the public could in theory “build their own personal free version of Spotify”. He added it could also enable tech companies to “educate models on modern music at scale”.

Intellectual property law has become a battleground between artists, writers and creatives on one side and AI companies on the other.

Policy Proposals and Responses

In the UK, creative professionals have raised concerns against a government suggestion to let AI companies utilize protected work without consent unless the owner opts out. Virtually every respondent to a government call for evidence on the idea has supported artists’ concerns.

A government minister for science, innovation 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 committed to make policy proposals on AI and copyright by next year.