3 Count: Downloadable Spotify

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1: Spotify Music Library Scraped by Pirate Activist Group 

First off today, Mitchell Peters at Billboard reports that a pirate activist group has scraped and released 256 million rows of track metadata and 86 million audio files from Spotify and is planning on releasing them in 300 TB chunks.

The first release is up on Anna’s Archive and includes the metadata from the download. Next, the group plans on releasing the music in order of popularity followed by additional metadata and album art. The group claims that the intent of this is preservation, but Spotify and musicians argue that this is nothing other than mass-scale piracy.

According to Spotify, the scraping was an “anti-copyright attack” and that they have already implemented new protections to prevent similar attacks as well as disabled the accounts involved with this one.

2: New York Times Reporter Sues Google, xAI, OpenAI Over Chatbot Training

Next up today, The Straights Times reports that New York Times reporter and author John Carreyrou, along with five other authors, has filed a copyright infringement lawsuit against xAI, Anthropic, Google, OpenAI, Meta Platforms and Perplexity alleging copyright infringement.

The authors are filing a group lawsuit and are not seeking to turn this into a class action case. According to the plaintiffs, class action lawsuits benefit the defendants by letting them settle widespread infringement relatively easily and inexpensively.

The lawsuit is the latest in a long line of cases filed against AI companies. However, this is the first one to list xAI as a defendant.

3: Brazilian Criminal Court Convicts Yout.com Owner in Landmark Stream Ripping Case

Finally today, Ernesto Van der Sar at Torrentfreak writes that a criminal court in Brazil has sentenced US citizen Johnathan Nader to three years and four months in prison, which is substituted by a financial penalty.

Nader was convicted of operating the stream ripping site Yout. He has famously tried to defend his site, even battling the RIAA in court to have it declared legal. That case is still under appeal. However, the criminal prosecution in Brazil moved forward with the judge ruling that Nader is liable for copyright infringement.

The verdict does offer alternative penalties including a financial one. However, the verdict does not mention a specific amount, just pinning it to the country’s minimum wage. As for why a Brazilian court took the case, it found that it had jurisdiction since the site is used by millions of Brazilian citizens.

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