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A digital rights organization has claimed to have harvested a vast number of songs from Spotify and is getting ready to publish them publicly.

Potential Impetus for AI Development

Industry experts noted the apparent data breach could aid artificial intelligence firms searching for material to develop their models.

An entity called Anna’s Archive reported it had obtained 86 million audio tracks from the platform and 256 million entries of associated data such as performer and album names. Spotify, which hosts more than 100 million tracks, confirmed that the leak did not represent its entire catalog.

“We have identified and disabled the malicious user accounts that were involved in unlawful scraping,” said a company representative.

The Stockholm-based service, which has more than 700 million users worldwide, added that an investigation into unauthorised access found a third party collected public metadata and used questionable methods to bypass DRM [digital rights management].

Group's Stated Goal and Worries

Spotify does not believe the music acquired by Anna’s Archive has been released yet. Anna’s Archive, which is known for providing links to copyright-infringing books, said in a blog it wanted to create a ‘preservation archive’ for music.

The group asserted the music files accounted for 99.6% of all music streamed to by its listeners and would be shared via ‘peer-to-peer networks’, a means of sharing large digital files online.

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

AI Training and Copyright Debate

A composer and campaigner for defending artists’ rights, said the leaked music would probably be used for training artificial intelligence systems.

“Training on illegally sourced data is unfortunately common in the tech sector, so this accessed music is almost certain to end up training AI models,” he said.

The group's website makes references to a large online archive, a vast online archive of pirated books that has reportedly been leveraged by the parent company of Facebook to train its systems.

The co-founder of an artificial intelligence company posted on the professional network that individuals of the public could in theory “build their own private free equivalent of the service”. The executive added it could also enable technology firms to “train on modern music at scale”.

Intellectual property law has emerged as a battleground between artists, writers and content creators on one side and tech giants on the other.

Government Considerations and Reactions

Across Britain, artists and writers have raised concerns against a government proposal to allow AI companies use protected work without consent unless the rights holder opts out. Almost every respondent to a government consultation on the idea has supported artists’ apprehensions.

A government minister for technology, research and technology informed parliament this month there was “little consensus” on the matter, adding that ministers would “take the time to get this correct”. The government has pledged to make regulatory plans on AI and copyright by March 2025.