Pirate activists have copied Spotify’s entire music library

A collective of pirate activists say they gained access to 256 million rows of metadata and 86 million audio files, equivalent to around 300 terabytes of data, from Spotify, Billboard reports.

The metadata, but no audio files, has been made publicly available through the open search engine Anna’s Archive.

Anna’s Archive describes the project as an effort to “preserve the knowledge and culture of humanity” by creating a music archive for preservation purposes.

Spotify itself has confirmed that it is investigating a breach in which a third party allegedly data scraped public metadata and unauthorizedly circumvented DRM protection to access certain audio files.

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• London internet attack highlights confusing hacktivism movement