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An activist organization has claimed to have harvested a vast number of songs from the popular streaming service and is getting ready to publish them publicly.

Potential Boost for AI Development

Observers said the apparent leak could aid artificial intelligence firms looking for material to develop their models.

A group known as Anna’s Archive reported it had obtained 86 million audio tracks from Spotify and 256 million rows of metadata such as artist and album names. Spotify, which carries more than 100 million songs, stated that the breach did not represent its full inventory.

“We have located and disabled the malicious user accounts that engaged in illegal scraping,” said a Spotify representative.

The Swedish company, which has more than 700 million subscribers worldwide, added that an investigation into unauthorised access found a external actor collected public metadata and employed questionable methods to circumvent DRM [digital rights management].

Archive's Stated Goal and Worries

The streaming service does not think the audio acquired by Anna’s Archive has been released yet. Anna’s Archive, which is known for providing links to pirated books, wrote in a blog it wanted to create a ‘preservation archive’ for music.

They claimed the music files represented 99.6% of all music streamed to by Spotify users and would be shared via ‘peer-to-peer networks’, a method of exchanging large data files online.

“Naturally Spotify doesn’t have all the music in the world, but it’s a great start,” commented Anna’s Archive, which frames its purpose as “safeguarding humanity’s knowledge and heritage”.

AI Training and Copyright Debate

A composer and campaigner for protecting artists’ copyright, remarked the leaked music would likely be utilized for training artificial intelligence systems.

“Educating models on illegally sourced data is sadly widespread in the tech sector, so this stolen music is highly likely to end up training AI models,” he said.

The group's website alludes to a large online archive, a huge online repository of copyrighted books that has allegedly been leveraged by Meta to develop its systems.

A founder of an artificial intelligence company posted on the professional network that members of the public could in principle “build their own personal free version of the service”. The executive added it could also allow tech companies to “train on contemporary music at scale”.

Intellectual property law has emerged as a key issue between artists, writers and creatives on one side and AI companies on the other.

Government Considerations and Reactions

In the UK, creative professionals have protested against a ministerial suggestion to let AI companies use copyright-protected work without consent unless the rights holder signals. Virtually every respondent to a government consultation on the idea has backed artists’ concerns.

The secretary of state for science, research and development informed parliament this month there was “no clear consensus” on the matter, adding that ministers would “take the time to get this right”. The government has committed to make policy proposals on AI and copyright by next year.