The activist hacker group Anna's Archive claimed to have scraped nearly all the library belonging to popular music-streaming platform Spotify and plans to save and distribute said library as a so-called preservation archive.
Anna's Archive claims to have collected 300 terabytes (TB) of data that contains metadata for the 256 million tracks and 86 million audio files, which they contend accounts for nearly 99.6% of the most-played songs on Spotify.
Their drift is to make the data available free of cost through Torrent, for the sake of future generations. She further states that the method discovered for scraping data from Spotify allows for the everlasting archiving of what they have validated as a "global music archive."
Spotify's Standpoint
Spotify also declares that this was illegal scraping from a third party, after which the company added that all these activities have affected user accounts, and they are now deactivating those accounts and putting more security measures in place to prevent such opportunities for unauthorized access in future.
Furthermore, while asserting that the scraping did not compromise any personal user identifiers or private identifiers, Spotify maintained that with the data scraping, it was totally unconcerned about metadata, which includes track names, artist names, album information, and portions of the audio files.
Legal and Ethical Issues
This sort of scraping and distribution overtly contravene copyright and Digital Rights Management (DRM) policies, to the point of enraging many composers, artists, and recording-rights holders to the degree of granting themselves permission to copy or illegally distribute their work.
A huge legal tarnished and security-red flagged episode not just for Spotify but for the entire music industry. As security and copyright incidents across the digital content world, most experts are now saying with that very incident.
At The Importance of the Event
* According to Anna's archive, nearly 99.6% of Spotify's used or listened-to data is collected.
* About 300TB of it is to be released via torrents.
* Spotify has begun the deactivation of user accounts and tightening its extra security measures.
* Such raise concerns and issues on legal implications, copyright violations, and digital security.
Conclusion
This is a huge event in digital copyright and security-and another troubling issue with the preservation of music around the world-incidentally making the techno issue almost trivial. Assuming Anna's Archive do truly characterize this as their "preservation" project, it has undoubtfully cut into much-legally and ethically-debated waters worldwide.
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