Spotify Says 'Anti-Copyright Extremists' Scraped Its Library (musically.com) 59
A group of activists has scraped Spotify's entire library, accessing 256 million rows of track metadata and 86 million audio files totaling roughly 300TB of data. The metadata has been released via Anna's Archive, a search engine for "shadow libraries" that previously focused on books.
Spotify described the activists as "anti-copyright extremists who've previously pirated content from YouTube and other platforms" and confirmed it is actively investigating the incident. The activists claim this represents "the world's first 'preservation archive' for music which is fully open" and covers "around 99.6% of listens."
They appear to have used Spotify's public web API to scrape the metadata and circumvented DRM to access audio files. Spotify insists that this is not a security breach affecting user data. Though the more pressing concern for the music industry may be AI training rather than pirate streaming services -- similar YouTube datasets have reportedly been used by unlicensed generative AI music services.
Spotify described the activists as "anti-copyright extremists who've previously pirated content from YouTube and other platforms" and confirmed it is actively investigating the incident. The activists claim this represents "the world's first 'preservation archive' for music which is fully open" and covers "around 99.6% of listens."
They appear to have used Spotify's public web API to scrape the metadata and circumvented DRM to access audio files. Spotify insists that this is not a security breach affecting user data. Though the more pressing concern for the music industry may be AI training rather than pirate streaming services -- similar YouTube datasets have reportedly been used by unlicensed generative AI music services.
Oh noes (Score:5, Insightful)
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Oh, this will get illegal Five Eyes surveillance for sure. It's a trillion-dollar industry.
Re:Oh noes (Score:4, Funny)
256 million tracks? If we go by what spotify pays artists then a crisp $100 bill should cover the damages.
Extreamists? (Score:5, Insightful)
Do we have to abuse every word until its meaningless.
You can call them extremists, when the bomb some data-center, or gun down a group of intellectual property attorneys at the firms anal barbecue.
Until I think we can go with 'activists' or maybe even 'agitators', hell 'criminal offenders' if you wish, but extremists is kind of a weird take.
Re:Extreamists? (Score:5, Funny)
>intellectual property attorneys at the firms anal barbecue.
Erm.. uhh. well that's one way to describe what's waiting for those people in the afterlife.
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I gotta be honest, finding the words attorneys and anal barbecue in the same sentence doesn't surprise me as much as it should.
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yeah, anal should have been annual, but given we are talking about lawyers, the first auto correct works just as well.
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A named drink?
Perhaps a refreshing Johnny Silverhand or David Martinez?
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it's pirates, ye scurvy-ridden pox-bucket! yarr!
Re:Extreamists? (Score:5, Funny)
Of course they are. They've downloaded all the data, so now they're ex-stream-ists.
Re: Extreamists? (Score:3)
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Political extremism might be usually defined as violent, but extreme just means at the ultimate end of something. A copyright extremist releasing the entirety of a copyrighted catalog is about as extreme as it gets for copyright.
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Yes but when it comes to a subject like 'Intellectual property' I think it is rather odd to characterize any opinion as 'extreme' at least as far as you are not restoring to violence or something to push that opinion.
If someone said only Chocolate is the only flavor of ice cream with eating, would you describe them as a "Chocolate Extremist"?
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Re:Extreamists? (Score:4, Interesting)
I thought the music industry was destroyed by the cassette tape. Did I miss something?
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I'm sure they will call them terrorists soon enough.
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Of course they're extremists. They don't believe anyone who produces anything should have the right to their own property. That people should produce music, software, and movies without getting any compensation.
Once again, if that is their belieft then they can go produce software, music, or movies and give it all away. Let's see how long they last doing that.
Stealing people's works does not help their cause.
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Of course they're extremists. They don't believe anyone who produces anything should have the right to their own property.
Perhaps they simply don't believe that copyright terms should have been extended, and that culture belongs to The People, as copyright law used to acknowledge with its original period. Maybe the extremists are the ones that think that culture should never belong to The People, like you.
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Over 90% of works receive over 90% of their lifetime revenue in the first 10 years after publishing. If copyright is really about promoting creative works, there is no reason for it to extend anywhere near the time period that it does.
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Wait, I am confused. Are you talking about spotify or the hackers?
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Maybe they are AI enthusiasts. Downloading data to train AI isn't piracy, just ask Facebook.
If this has any impact at all on artist compensation, it will be because Spotify is using it as an excuse.
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You can call them extremists, when the bomb some data-center, or gun down a group of intellectual property attorneys at the firms anal barbecue.
The word you're thinking of is "terrorists" (i.e. people who employ terror as a political tactic).
"Extremists" simply means people whose views lie at the extreme end of a range of views on an issue.
Sometimes terrorists are also extremists, and sometimes extremists are also terrorists, but they are nevertheless two different words with different meanings.
Do these scraper guys qualify as extremists? I don't know -- their position on copyright law seems to be that it can and should be ignored. Is that the mo
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Do we have to abuse every word until its meaningless.
You can call them extremists, when the bomb some data-center, or gun down a group of intellectual property attorneys at the firms anal barbecue.
Until I think we can go with 'activists' or maybe even 'agitators', hell 'criminal offenders' if you wish, but extremists is kind of a weird take.
Wait, I am confused. Are you talking about spotify or the hackers?
Those "extremists", were their names... (Score:5, Insightful)
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Anna's Archive was, in fact, a major source of training data for many of the above.
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Why didn't you say so?
That makes this independently produced AI training material, and therefore, a matter of national defense. And thus, copyright and other nuisance laws don't apply. The fate of our nation is more important them some silly law. /s
Training Data Set Defense (Score:3)
I'm sure this is all just a misunderstanding by Spotify and they drop it once they learn the "extremists" were simply collecting data to train their AI model. Hell, Trump may even preemptively pardon them for AI or something.
Re: Training Data Set Defense (Score:2)
If someone tells him Spotify is foreign, I'm sure he'll do it unless someone else talks to him first.
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Right?
If this were OpenAI, nobody would bat an eye.
Good. Copyright must be reformed. (Score:1)
Copyright is a PRIVILEGE we give to CREATORS and 5 years is a reasonable copyright term limit, more than that DISCOURAGES creation.
fffuck spotify (Score:5, Insightful)
Here's why [reddit.com]
Will the spotify year in review be updated to tell you how many children were trafficked as the result of the ICE ads they carry?
P.S. (Score:1)
60% Insightful
30% Troll
10% Informative
30% (I know those are not real percentages but anyway) of Slashdotters would have turned in Anne Frank
The end (Score:2)
Nice job! (Score:2)
Good. (Score:3)
I hope a company in China gets ahold of the database and trains a good music generator AI on it and releases it for free.
People hate GenAI because it *doesn't* suck... (Score:1)
...not because it does.
It's all about gatekeeping the skill, time, and budget floor and propping up the wall between "producers" and "consumers". I worked hard to get where I am, therefore it shouldn't be made easier. I worked hard to make $20/hour, therefore we shouldn't raise the minimum wage. Etc.
The reason there aren't legions and legions of programmers protesting AI on twitter is because programmers are accustomed to change and we've learned to embrace it, yet every time there's a technology that chan
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>>every time there's a technology that changes how art is made (cameras, digital painting, 3d rendering, even pre-made pigments), there are a group of artists who flip their shit and say that the new technology is going to kill creativity and ruin art as we know it
Except those pigments weren't made by grinding up existing paintings. That's the difference.
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These sorts of theatrics exactly.
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Except it DOES suck. The images are starting to get there, maybe. But the text and audio are so far from good. Not to mention the amount of resources that are being consumed for made up legal cases and super smooth songs.
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Give it a bit more time. Diffusers took off in 2022, LLMs in 2023. AI is growing faster than many prior tech, but it is still at its infancy. Not long ago people laughed about the number of fingers, now they are scared of not being able to tell fact from fiction. I am a bit surprised that video AI might get faster to high quality results than text, but on the other hand the text models are fricking huge compared to image and video AI ... maybe text is more dense than we think.
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I figured someone would bring up the myth of "the myth of talent". The art community is the absolute worst about this. To be good at art, you need both innate talent and practice. People who have that innate talent think that practice will get everyone there -- believe me, it doesn't. The reason you think it does is because of survivorship bias. Nobody asks me how I got to not be able to do anything art-wise except create copies of what I can see, so they don't ever find out that I practiced for decades an
Irony (Score:5, Interesting)
Re: Irony (Score:1)
I can also confirm this, they had a lot of scene-compilation albums that never were officially released still with tags etc, and other unlicensed bootlegs all pirated from various sources..
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Oh yeah, I too remember that. It was covered here on Slashdot: https://yro.slashdot.org/story... [slashdot.org]
The pirate now cries foul about piracy.
When the exploiter of artists is exploited... (Score:5, Insightful)
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Just like stockbrokers when some new way of queering the pitch doesn't benefit them, they go running to Mom and Dad squealing "S'not fair!'
File size... (Score:2)
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They said 160 kbit/s Ogg. For exactly that reason, you need to limit archive size and still have an acceptable audio quality.
I'd think for an archive that's fine. If you want to stream high quality audio, you find the price list on the Spotify website.
Re: File size... (Score:2)
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Spotify will now scramble to prevent this. I doubt there will be continuous updates. I think they may when Spotify stops worrying and the anti-scraping tech is no longer changed start another attempt, but they surely won't be able to rip it album by album as it is uploaded to Spotify.
Smells More Like AI Scraping (Score:2)