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A digital rights group has claimed to have harvested millions of songs from Spotify and is getting ready to release them online.

Potential Boost for Artificial Intelligence Training

Industry experts noted the apparent leak could aid artificial intelligence firms looking for material to train their technology.

An entity known as Anna’s Archive reported it had scraped 86 million audio tracks from Spotify and 256 million rows of associated data such as performer and album names. Spotify, which hosts more than 100 million songs, stated that the leak did not constitute its entire inventory.

“We have located and disabled the nefarious user accounts that were involved in illegal scraping,” stated a Spotify spokesperson.

The Stockholm-based company, which has more than 700 million subscribers worldwide, added that an inquiry into unauthorised access identified a third party scraped public metadata and employed illicit methods to circumvent DRM [digital rights management].

Group's Stated Mission and Concerns

Spotify does not think the music acquired by Anna’s Archive has been made public yet. Anna’s Archive, which is recognized for offering links to pirated books, wrote 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 Spotify users and would be distributed via ‘torrents’, a method of sharing large digital files online.

“Naturally Spotify doesn’t have all the music in the world, but it’s a fantastic start,” said Anna’s Archive, which describes its mission as “preserving humanity’s knowledge and heritage”.

AI Training and Intellectual Property Battleground

Ed Newton-Rex for defending artists’ rights, remarked the breached music would likely be utilized for training artificial intelligence systems.

“Educating models on pirated data is unfortunately widespread in the AI industry, so this stolen music is almost certain to end up training AI models,” he stated.

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

The co-founder of an artificial intelligence company posted on LinkedIn that members of the public could in theory “create their own personal free version of the service”. He said it could also allow tech companies to “educate models on modern music at a large volume”.

Intellectual property law has become a battleground between creatives, authors and content creators on one side and tech giants on the other.

Government Proposals and Reactions

In the UK, artists and writers have protested against a government proposal to allow AI companies use copyright-protected work without consent unless the rights holder signals. Almost every participant to a government call for evidence on the idea has backed artists’ concerns.

A government minister for technology, innovation and development informed parliament this month there was “no clear consensus” on the issue, noting that ministers would “use the time to get this correct”. The administration has committed to make regulatory plans on AI and copyright by March 2025.