Here’s what bothers me: isn’t the United States a free market? What crime did he actually commit? Using services exactly as they are offered? It turns out that now, if you take advantage of the system as it was designed and gain a financial edge, you become a criminal—but if a major corporation does it, they just get a slap on the wrist.
>isn’t the United States a free market? What crime did he actually commit? Using services exactly as they are offered?
From the indictment:
>SMITH’s streaming fraud lasted from 2017 to 2024 and he executed it in three steps. First, SMITH created thousands of fraudulent accounts on the Streaming Platforms (the “Bot Accounts”) that he could use to stream songs. Second, he used software to cause the Bot Accounts to continuously stream purported songs that he owned, which were generally created using super intelligence. Third, Smith collected royalties based on the fraudulent streams he orchestrated his own Bot Accounts to conduct.
>SMITH spread his automated streams across thousands of songs to avoid anomalous streaming as to any single song, which would likely cause the Streaming Platforms to discover his scheme. At times SMITH was using as many as 10,000 Bot Accounts at once to fraudulently stream music, and he used fake email accounts and fraudulently-obtained debit cards to create the Bot Accounts. As SMITH explained it in an email, he needed “a TON of songs fast” in order to circumvent the “anti fraud policies” of the Streaming Platforms. To obtain the necessary number of songs for his scheme to succeed, SMITH turned to super intelligence, which he used to create hundreds of thousands of AI-generated songs for which he could manipulate the streams.
So this isn't even "haha wouldn't it be funny if we make a 10 hour song that's just silence and then convince people to play it while they're sleeping", which would at least be vaguely legal. This is far closer to ad fraud.
Careful, promoting thoughtcrime by malquoting Miniluv based on old documents that have not been rectified by Minitrue with the latest updates to newspeak could land you in a joycamp.
Considering the White House's market-manipulation and unprecedented insider stock trading in the last year, I would not be surprised if it's part of another corrupt scheme.
For example, pump-and-dumping .si domain names or some other asset which connects to the phrase/acronym.
It's also just a coincidence that his kids, who have no background in technology and no knowledge of programming or cryptography have a crypto coin company that sells, nothing of value, with, basically 0 advertising, and makes billions of dollars, mostly from deals with Gulf Arab dictators, who then get favorable deals with their dad ...
I find the domain name theory funny/sad and par for the course, but it does seem like an awfully inefficient method of corruption compared to what shitler and his pals have been up to so far, no?
Like going from very successfully robbing banks to robbing convenience stores?
I have always been surprised by the pettiness and vulgarity of corruption. Sometimes Trump tries to steal $10,000,000,000 from the IRS, but sometimes he hawks branded Bibles for $59.99. I don't understand why someone with more money than he could spend in a dozen lifetimes regularly humiliates himself for a few grand.
There's more than one criminal in government you absolute dork.
I get that politics is a team sport and all, but like the fraud and abuse Pelosi got away with is so infinitesimal compared to the absolute bald-faced grift. Did she "sell" cell-phones and then never deliver? In August alone Trump made a quarter billion dollars in securities trades.
One of the talking heads was pointing that the AI has emphasis on "artificial" - created by humans - whereis super intelligence brings up the idea of something super/above to humans, and that among others has the political dimension of democracy - power of the people - vs. dictatorship - power over people.
I'm sure he was thinking about the divisiveness of the term 'AI' and not the millions of dollars AI companies have given him or the massive amounts of money he and his family hold in investments in AI data centers.
"Can we find an even-more Matrix/Terminator-sounding name??"
I wouldn't be surprised if it was industry-pushed to try to get people used to the idea of "don't question the machine, let us replace you." Are you "super", after all?
I find this fascinating, actually. On one hand we must disincentivize fraud. On the other hand enforcement of laws really should have observable utility and not feel arbitrary. I’m much more on the “fix the model” side of the spectrum on this one. That doesn’t mean I think we should allow what SMITH did.
I feel uncomfortable when we start handing out prison for things that are isomorphic in utility to things that seem clearly legal.
Which of these are fraud:
a) I block or skip ads in media I consume
b) 1000 people block or skip ads in media they consume
c) I convince 1000 humans to play my songs every day and all of them listen to the ads
d) I convince 1000 of humans to play my songs every day and all of them skip the ads
e) I program 1000 bots to play my songs every day
(b) (d) and (e) all have the same outcome for ad agencies, nobody hears the ads. If (e) is the only one that’s problematic, then we aren’t solving the problem by prosecuting (e).
Similar vein to Matt Levine’s “everything is securities fraud” takes.
the difference is that (d) is not fraud and (e) is fraud, lol. Duh.
you seem to be thinking of the legal system like some kind of programming language / logic paradigm and it is not that and never has been
most likely ad-blocking would also be considered some sort of fraud (or rather: companies would block using their services if the ads were not seen, and then circumventing that would be regarded as fraud) except that it is not politically/socially tenable to do that at all.
It’s rhetorical. Setting aside the obvious credit card fraud because I didn’t know that was a factor when initially asking the question, no it’s not clear to me that using bot accounts to consume a digital streaming service is fraudulent or morally wrong the same way assuming a fake name to use someone else’s credit card is.
I don’t care if a service seeks civil remedy for any damages due to a breach of contract.
I also don’t fancy a future where people have to be worried about criminal penalties for spinning up a bunch of agents to automate something that enriches them.
Is buying likes and gh stars fraud? Is it okay if humans click the star button? Is it okay if a large distributed workload does it?
Anyway my actual stance is that it looks like in this case it’s not the bots that are the key focus of this matter so my earlier comment is mostly just a digression. And that I’d hope this case would be ruled similarly if for example human users were paid to stream his songs, however that would be adjudicated.
>b) 1000 people block or skip ads in media they consume
Not doing something is generally considered okay, even if it decreases someone else's revenue. eg. saying that a given product is a scam and not worth the money (assuming it's true). Same with skipping ads (eg. TiVo)
>c) I convince 1000 humans to play my songs every day and all of them listen to the ads
>d) I convince 1000 of humans to play my songs every day and all of them skip the ads
Legal, because the whole point of advertising is to convince people to do something, even if it costs someone else money (eg. drugs, which might cost your insurance provider money). Where you might get into trouble is if the actions turn out to be fraud, eg. telling people to stream music, even though no one's listening to it, for the sole purpose of getting streaming minutes, or setting up a kickback scheme (might be tortious interference). Again, going back to the drug example, it's pretty intuitive. Advertising a drug? That's fine. Telling people to buy your drug, just so they can chuck it into the trash, for the sole purpose of enriching yourself? Probably illegal.
I wasn’t detailed enough. What I was actually curious about is whether it mattered that bots were used.
d.1) convince humans and they use their main account
d.2) convince humans and they use and alt account
I think the resolution to my question is: it’s still fraud if humans do it, like you said. And it makes me wonder if more things should be considered fraud like paying people with free products for Amazon reviews or purchasing GH stars.
> telling people to stream music, even though no one's listening to it, for the sole purpose of getting streaming minutes
How is that fundamentally different from netflix or youtube auto-playing something after a video finishes, knowing that a large percentage of the people who started the first video won't be present or attentive to the second, in order to artificially inflate views for the content they're promoting.
1. the auto-play does eventually stop, presumably because they need to maintain some semblance of legitimacy to advertisers
2. caveat emptor. how youtube works and how ads are played is hardly secret information, so accusations that google is deceiving advertisers (not just providing a subpar product) is hard to make.
3. people have tried suing companies for this, but they were over securities fraud rather than deceiving ad buyers. No idea how successful they were though. it's worth noting that suing for securities fraud is easier because unlike with advertising, you have to declare risk factors, hence why every company's prospectus lists all potential list factors under the sun.
The nuance is financial extraction coupled with deceit.
If your scheme doesn't extract value, nor costs anything to other parties, there is no victims, you can get away with it. Even if policies say no. The risk is termination of service.
Skipping ads is a loss of opportunity for advertisers. But they don't get extracted money. They may not like it, but they can continue to fish elsewhere and aren't being siphoned because you skip their ads.
If you spawn websites and farm fake viewers to scam ad networks, you are engaged in criminal activity. Not because you fake viewing ads. But because you extracted a profit of this activity which was extracted from another party (via deceits).
Isn't the nuance mostly or only the fraudulently obtained debit cards?
I suspect the case hinged on that, and everything else was legal, albeit part of the fraud, and was included as a complete description of the scheme.
To be fair, I'm guessing he couldn't have created the scale of fake accounts without debit card fraud, but creating multiple accounts, even if they're fake, is usually just a TOS violation, or maybe a civil matter, not criminal.
> but creating multiple accounts, even if they're fake, is usually just a TOS violation, or maybe a civil matter, not criminal.
Yes, in and of itself, creating multiple accounts in violation of TOS is probably not a criminal fraud under either state or federal law.
But when you do it as the mechanism to conceal streaming manipulation in violation of the agreement that governs the terms of payment, and thereby to secure large amounts of money from the streaming service under false pretenses (and, given the structure of streaming payments, to deny payment to other song owners which they would have received without the deception) on the other hand is a different story.
Like yeah, flexing your index finger isn’t a crime, either, but if you are holding a gun with that finger on the trigger and the barrel pointed at someone's head...
The law very often is focussed more than anything about the purpose and effect of an action, and that you can ignore that and describe the action in terms that aren't criminal without considering purpose and effect really doesn't matter.
The fraudulent debit cards are definitely criminal.
Using bots to automate listening to his own songs was likely fraudulent too because he was being awarded royalties. If his songs had been monetized in some other way I'm not sure what he did would be fraud.
I don't think creating multiple accounts is, even if it's in violation of the TOS.
If that was the case, anyone who signs up for multiple accounts on a website/app to get multiple coupons/bonuses/etc... would be committing fraud.
None of this is close to firing a gun pointed at someone's head.
They very clearly made an example of him given the sentencing, but I don't think they were confident about all the charges in the indictment based on the plea agreement and the crazy high succuss rates in federal criminal cases.
I don’t think fraud requires enrichment, does it? I know we commonly associate the two but it’s somewhat of an annoyance IMO that we only care about scheming material
misrepresentation when it involve money.
Edit: interesting it does look like there must be an object of the fraud, likely to prevent the law from being used broadly to punish lying.
Could be a separate charge, I agree that's an even clearer cut.
But I was responding to the comment touching on more general seemingly ambiguous situations.
What makes Terms of Service / contract violations a different case than deceit for financial profit. Why is one tolerated by justice but the other condemned as criminal activity.
But you are right, debit card fraud, wire fraud and the likes are clearly defined as criminal.
Is it fraud for me to spawn a bunch of bots to listen to YOUR music? In fact, this has happened before, and people who are not involved at all get punished for the fraud that they didn’t commit. So it’s a quite tricky problem, and I agree that it just isn’t that straightforward.
This is a thing. You want to hurt someone's business? Buy a bot farm to engage in obvious click fraud on their account. Google or whoever will assume it's them doing it and shut them down, drop them or punish them otherwise. It's like a false flag operation. A superficial investigation will point to "who benefits? well it's clear who's doing this".
"Money going to one person through deceit that would've otherwise gone to others" has a pretty material utility impact on the "others," even if they're a large aggregate or if they're corporate interests/investors who "have enough money."
I lean fairly redistributive but through consensus and governance, not through fraud.
So how come Sam Altman & friends aren't in jail yet, but Aaron Swartz was facing life-ruining charges?
If creating bots and mass-violating ToSes for financial gain is fraud while doing bot stuff for fun is totally fine, then clearly the AI companies should be treated like giant criminal cartels, should they not?
Skip is fine. Blocking with third party tools is a breach of contract as a consumer, but not fraud nor a crime.
>b) 1000 people block or skip ads in media they consume.
If they individually decide to do this, then it's 1000 times fine or 1000 instances of breach of contract.
If they get together and do this collectively, or are instructed to do so by one person, it starts to encroach on civil conspiracy.
>c) I convince 1000 humans to play my songs every day and all of them listen to the ads
If you convince them to play the songs on the basis of the music, that's the very object of the contract.
If you convince them to do so on the basis of the ads, presumably you incentivize them with money if they listen to the song, then it's fraud. It's arguable of course, but if you are paying the listeners, then it obviously makes the value of the ads 0, you are knowingly selling something that has 0 value and charging a comission for that sale.
>d) I convince 1000 humans to play my songs every day and all of them to skip the ads
d) This is weird because your revenue would be 0 in this case. But arguably you would be benefitting from the service of music distribution without paying for it with the cost of serving ads along your music. It's a completely different situation than the one in the OP, it's more like piracy, less like fraud.
Again if by skip you mean a service provider interface, then that's fine, I'm assuming you mean block with ublock or some third party reverse engineered thing that's forbidden by ToS.
>e) I program 1000 bots to play my songs every day
e) Of course this is fraud, I think it's obvious to you and you are just positing this as part of the obvious end of the slippery slope, so it's not worth explaining why. But just as a teaser, it involves agreeing and breaching 1000 contracts and creating 1000 fake identities, so identity fraud at least!
>(b) (d) and (e) all have the same outcome for ad agencies, nobody hears the ads. If (e) is the only one that’s problematic, then we aren’t solving the problem by prosecuting (e).
Regardless of the specific case, in general there's many cases where regulation attacks only some scenarios which cause a damage, and that's fine. For example drunk driving, driving too fast, and blinking at the wrong moment all might have the same consequence, but we only regulate the first and the second.
>Similar vein to Matt Levine’s “everything is securities fraud” takes.
Haven't read that, but this is strictly not securities fraud, just fraud.
Yes the list is rhetorical. Yes I am aware this isn’t securities fraud.
Personally, I am not sure I consider pointing a bot at a service to use it, even if it enriches you, generally to be evil or fraud. I think now more than ever the concept of a bot is almost meaningless. So my angle with the comment is to talk about the spectrum and understand why people so clearly see (e) as criminal relative to the other situations when the harm or effective outcome is the same.
We seem generally okay with deception until it is used for personal enrichment. Why is that?
Should be a civil case. The readiness which with the United States incarcerates is a moral disgrace. Especially given the level of criminality the government itself exercises that goes unpunished.
Using the fraudulently obtained debit cards should be a prison sentence. That's real money, from real people.
Don't focus on the streaming revenue angle. Focus on the fact that this was a giant money-laundering exercise, allowing him to turn stolen debit cards into real money.
>Should be a civil case. The readiness which with the United States incarcerates is a moral disgrace. Especially given the level of criminality the government itself exercises that goes unpunished.
So what's your actual argument here? Is it
1. whatever he did isn't wire fraud?
2. whatever he did is wire fraud, but wire fraud shouldn't be prosecuted, similar to how crashing a car isn't prosecuted?
3. whatever he did is criminal and should be prosecuted, but trump is abusing his pardoning powers so every other white collar criminal should be off the hook?
What part of doesn't merit a prison sentence escapes you?
I'll take all 3. It really doesn't matter. I don't want this person going to prison in my name. A criminal case is supposed to represent the public interest. A free society is meant to set a high bar to deprive someone of their liberty. The streaming platform can sue him if they like. A civil case that results in punitive damages is also understandable.
In my view, incarceration in this instance is a disgrace. The argument is a moral one, not a legalistic one.
Perhaps the statutes around wire fraud should be reformed. IDK it's not my area, and my argument doesn't rely on a legalistic interpretation, rather it suggests if the law's answer here is to put this person in prison something is wrong with the law. That is the argument. You seem to be asking me how would I codify the solution or else you have misunderstood me.
It's true that the state has discretion on whether to pursue a crime, and this is apparently true for harder crimes like murder.
I guess the state prosecution just disagreed on this matter, I'm assuming that, within their specialty, they take the top N cases and dismiss the other pettier cases, and in this case this case made the cut according to the workload capacity of the fraud prosecution workforce.
In raw stolen amounts, it's not small at all, it's like 8 million dollars, which is an amount that can be argued to be worth one or two lives, it may be the cost of complex surgeries and health insurance, or the cost for good nutrition, living space, so it could be argued that this person is taking those resources away from someone else, no matter how inert or ridiculous the means by which they stole that money may be. If someone defrauds 500 million dollars by impersonating a clown, the optics of defrauding 500 million should prevail over the optics of "putting someone in jail for being a clown".
No? A bank is a regulated entity in the public interest.
Pointing a gun in someone's face is also not in the public interest.
Juicing some streaming numbers hurt who? Spotify's margin? It's not even clear to me without diving into the actual case where he went from getting an edge to engaging in the alleged crime. Or what he could have done differently to preclude criminal prosecution but could have still resulted in a civil case.
More importantly, why should he have to go to prison? Why don't you make that moral argument instead of engaging in such a misread of my position.
> Juicing some streaming numbers hurt who? Spotify's margin?
You don't seem to understand how the streaming revenue model works, and why this is an egregious fraud against the public interest. You believe that stream fraud is someone simply stealing from Spotify/YouTube/etc, so who cares.
In reality, all musicians share a pool of revenue across ads + subscriptions on each platform (typically two-thirds of the total, although each platform has a different rev share model).
This fraud only marginally impacts Spotify financials, as their cut is fixed and taken from the topline [1]. But someone abusing the system like this guy breaks the model for everyone. Not only you're stealing money from millions of musicians, but you're undermining the confidence in the whole industry.
I don't have an opinion if this merits jail time or not, but yes, this is pretty bad. Like money counterfeiting-bad.
[1] ps: of course, if this becomes rampant, musicians get screwed and turn against Spotify, so it's in their best interest to do whatever it take down the fraudsters. It's a never-ending cat-and-mouse game.
That doesn't sound like something that should cause someone to be locked away either. Prison should be reserved for people who are too dangerous to be living among the rest of us, along with short jail times when needed to prevent people from fleeing prior to their day in court when the risk of that happening is high enough.
>No? A bank is a regulated entity in the public interest.
What does this even mean? Only crimes against things are "regulated" should be prosecuted? Or "public interest", however vaguely that's defined?
>Juicing some streaming numbers hurt who? Spotify's margin?
Other artists. The subscriber/ad revenues are divided pro-rata (unclear whether it's by subscriber or across all subscribers), so by streaming a bunch of fake music, it's displacing the streaming minutes of other artists, ever so slightly.
Moreover, even if it is spotify that's losing money, how is it less in the "public interest" than banks? For the sake of argument let's subtract the threat of violence, and assume they hacked an ATM or something. Would that suddenly not be in the "public interest" to prosecute the offenders? Why should multi-billion dollar banks deserve more sympathy than multi-billion dollar tech companies, especially for crimes that in all likelihood won't lead to either company's demise?
I take it based on your other comments that the distinction between criminal and civil proceedings is suitably apparent to you?
If so I struggle to understand then why this leap is so hard for you.
You and I can have a private dispute without the government getting involved as a prosecuting party, yes? Banks are highly regulated because the state has sought fit to take an interest in how they are run. Roughly, because if a bank defrauds its numerous depositors this incurs a societal cost. Similarly, violence is also regulated, as it is inimical to the state's requisite monopoly on violence to tolerate private expressions of this power.
I simply do not get the intuition here that it is in the public interest to put this person in prison in the same way the intuition may surface in these other cases. If you disagree that is fine, but then I'm curious to hear where your intuition on this private vs public interest line is. Of course it is somewhat vague. If the public interest was clear and obvious to everyone electoral politics would not exist.
Can you offer a positive moral argument for incarceration in this case? Surely you are aware of principles around the burden of proof? Since you seem to be on the pro criminal prosecution side here why don't you take up the burden of saying you want this man to suffer in prison for his crime? I understand your frustration that I don't have all the answers. It would be a more impressive indictment if I was willing to send people to prison under such circumstances.
I take the burden of depriving a fellow citizen of their liberty in a free society rather seriously.
Do you? If so, please explain to me how you alleviate yourself of this burden in this case. I'm open to being persuaded.
So going back to the ATM hacking example, do you think that's criminal or not? What if it's not a "regulated" institution, like an ordinary business? Say you scam Acme Co out of a few million dollars. Luckily for society, Acme Co is a trillion dollar company, so they could stand to lose that. The only harm is to its margins and shareholders, like you said earlier. Does that mean it's fine to hack Acme Co, worst case scenario I have to repay what I stole, and maybe pay their lawyer/cleanup costs?
If you can't clearly articulate what the "public interest" means, it just feels like this whole thing is just a long winded way for you to say that we shouldn't be prosecuting non-violent crimes, unless the victim is sufficiently sympathetic, in which case we throw the book at them. That's no way to run a justice system.
>Can you offer a positive moral argument for incarceration in this case? Surely you are aware of principles around the burden of proof? Since you seem to be on the pro criminal prosecution side here why don't you take up the burden of saying you want this man to suffer in prison for his crime? I understand your frustration that I don't have all the answers. It would be a more impressive indictment if I was willing to send people to prison under such circumstances.
You can make the same arguments about the questionable utility of incarceration for violent crimes too. The typical arguments against incarceration works equally well for violent crimes as they do for non-violent ones.
I think you can look at relative impact and decide this. Did the “white collar” crime wreck people’s lives, leaving them destitute? Jail. Did it kill people through negligence, lowering safety standards, or similar? Jail. Did it hurt the bottom line of a large company by 1% or less with no other obvious impact? Maybe they just have to pay it back plus a large, punitive penalty. Maybe they have to do some public service too. But jail doesn’t really make sense. If anything, jail just prevents them from compensating the victim.
Less than 1/10 of restitution is ever paid out. When you send someone to jail, especially for a long time, you’re basically guaranteeing that they aren’t going to make good on any victim compensation.
>Did it hurt the bottom line of a large company by 1% or less with no other obvious impact? Maybe they just have to pay it back plus a large, punitive penalty. Maybe they have to do some public service too. But jail doesn’t really make sense. If anything, jail just prevents them from compensating the victim.
So what does it mean for the movie trope where a hacker steals fractions of cents from everyone's bank account, leading him to get millions in loot? By any meaningful measure that didn't hurt anyone's bottom line, so that ought to be fine, right? Even if you think this is somehow okay, what about the "death by a thousands cuts" problem, where a trillion dollar company gets scammed 1000 times, which becomes a deleterious amount? Do you have to prosecute people at some point? How would that work?
This wasn't a dispute though. This was clearly fraud, and I think it becomes criminal due to wire fraud (fraud crossing state or national borders).
To me, this falls under the category of white collar crime. I'm OK with white collar criminals serving time. It's not like this case is in a gray area. It's clearly a conspiracy to commit fraud on a large scale.
I get where you're coming from. It's not stealing. But, setting up fake accounts in order to trick Spotify into sending him money is clearly fraud.
Bank robbery typically involves violence or the threat of violence. I don’t think the two are really comparable.
To justify imprisonment (rather than purely monetary penalties or civil judgements) you really have to look at the relative scale of harm and the type of harm inflicted. Imprisonment doesn’t always make sense, there are many nonviolent crimes where a purely monetary penalty would be more appropriate. For one thing, imprisonment can prevent people from paying back the victim.
I feel like you are missing the rather obvious or else the note implies. Luckily the law is not so rigid as to be hamstrung by such sophistry. I didn't assault you, I merely invited your face to make an acquaintance with my fist!
The reason the note works is banks don't want to pay the cost of having their employees getting their brains blown out. Passing a note with this understanding means one knows they are making a threat.
Agreed, and if this didn’t involve the threat of violence then imprisonment wouldn’t necessarily be justified—in other words, if this were the case, it would make sense to change the law to a purely monetary penalty. But of course it is an implicit threat!
Are you fine with paying $50,000 a year to separate this person from society because he cheated some company? Are we really taking corporate personhood in this direction now?
You don't have to go that far for bad stuff Spotifys done - at minimum they used pirated libraries back at their start, etc, and they've overall contributed to less payouts for artists. Kind of the Uber of music.
I don’t believe that people running this kind of scam are engaging in careful moral reasoning about acceptable victims. The man who did this would surely have stolen $50,000 from my grandma if he thought he saw a clever way to get away with it.
I can’t really decide. Punishments for crimes need to be enough to prevent people from doing them. Guy made millions of dollars fraudulently, what’s an acceptable punishment if it’s not jail time?
Same thing with big companies. They knowingly break the law because the punishment is less than what they gain from it. There’s no incentive not to break the law at that point.
A fine of an equal amount + s&p gains on that amount over that period of time. This is not a person who has indicated they would physically be unsafe in society. Many people don’t have the opportunity to lie at that level, but would, are they dangerous and in hiding?
If they spent a good chunk of it at the time and you don't let them discharge that fine in bankruptcy, isn't that basically a sentence to a life of poverty to pay back the $X million owed? Median US income is about 90k, let's say that left him owing 4M (less than half of 8M + interest), that's 44 years to pay back 4M even if the entirety of your salary was going to it.
Is "forfeit what you've got and go to jail for 18 months" harsher than that? I'd pick the one that let me get a clean start after.
And in the case that it wasn't spent, and by fine you mean as a replacement for any forfeiture, not in addition, then sibling comment has a great point that "if you get caught, you just gotta give it back" is an incentive to commit fraud, not one against committing fraud.
I mean, returning what you stole, surrendering the gains you made from what you stole, and covering the gap of the person you stole from seems pretty reasonable? Like, they were made whole. It's a net loss to the thief.
Prison for theft is so brutally cruel. Who was really harmed by this once he paid the money back? A line item in some megacorp that was lower for awhile?
No one felt anxiety or pain, the megacorp probably barely noticed. Pay them back with interest, move on.
Obviously the calculus changes for violent thefts, or breaking into someone's home. Those cause real emotional impacts to people. Of course simply returning those items doesn't make someone whole.
It matters who you're stealing from. And if you're undermining the system itself. This is why counterfeiting currency is considered such a serious crime. If I photocopy a $1 bill, I get, what, $1 for free? That's not that big a deal. But because having fake currency in circulation undermines the entire system, and thus makes for serious crime, so, too, does having fake listeners and getting rich of the royalties. Who cares if Spotify's CEO can't get buy forest in Sweden, in duping the system, it undermines the drive for real actual human people to create music that other actual human people want to listen to. That there are other injustices on the world doesn't undermine this injustice being addressed.
I simply don't buy that this is like copying a $1 bill.
And I don't think you do either. I think one could construct a suitably objective test that would relegate certain instances of this sort of fraud to the civil courts where I think they belong.
Part of the problem is conflating the private Spotify ecosystem with "the system" writ large. In any event, a civil case with appropriate punishment would serve to dissuade others from taking the same action.
I don't know that you can make a strong case that the US over-punishes white-collar/economic crime. This isn't drug crime. The average full-of-shit-founder-or-CEO isn't getting locked up. Perhaps the US would be better off with more enforcement of large-scale economic fraud and less of petty drug possession and sales. Put some teeth into due diligence and see if peoples' investments improve.
>To obtain the necessary number of songs for his scheme to succeed, SMITH turned to super intelligence, which he used to create hundreds of thousands of AI-generated songs for which he could manipulate the streams.
> ‘Super intelligence’ is the term that President Donald Trump has ordered government employees to use in documents and statements in the place of ‘artificial intelligence’.
The best part about all the insistence about it being the Department of War, is that Hegseth is still the secretary of defense
The original purpose of the org was also explicitly defensive, with failing to prevent Pearl Harbor being an explicit influence for improving communication and cooperation between arms of the military through a combined leadership.
How much power does this actually have in the US? I remember here in the UK when Jacob Rees-Mogg (a man known for his dedication to traditionalism) required that his staff follow a fussy style guide demanding all non-titled men be addressed as Esq and to use imperial units. As far as I'm aware, it never stuck.
Generating the AI music wasn't illegal. Using bots to inflate /listens/ of an AI-generated song probably is against a platform's TOS, but isn't inherently illegal.
However, using bots to collect royalties on the songs generated definitely fits within the definition of wire fraud as he was using electronic communications (i.e., the internet), to carry out a scheme to defraud streaming services of money.
From the statement: At times SMITH was using as many as 10,000 Bot Accounts at once to fraudulently stream music, and he used fake email accounts and fraudulently-obtained debit cards to create the Bot Accounts.
So the bots he actually used were most likely illegal (though it's true other bots might not be).
I don’t think the issue is the fact that the songs were AI generated as much as it is he faked tens of thousands of customers (presumably in free tiers) streaming the songs that he owned in order to collect royalties. That does indeed sound like garden variety fraud to me.
If you and I have a contract that I’ll pay you for unique shoppers referred to my store and you just go in yourself to trigger the door counter 10,000 times wearing different disguises, it’s pretty clear that you have defrauded me.
They got him on wire fraud. Everytime a case has a shaky legal basis, they go for wire fraud. The legalese is stupidly broad, encompassing, and comes with huge penalties. [1] Up to 20 years in prison for any scheme to defraud that uses practically any digital tech at any point. It probably made sense in the 50s when wire fraud would have been quite a specific sort of crime, but in the era of the internet - now basically anything and everything can be construed to be wire fraud.
In Kelly vs US [1] a couple of politicians were convicted of wire fraud for closing certain lanes to create a traffic jam for political benefit. It was overturned by the Supreme Court but that gets into interpretive arguments of what the statute means when it says "OR". The law isn't like code. Anyhow, yeah the wire fraud statute really needs to be rewritten or broken down into more appropriate and targeted statutes. But that will never happen because it's a superweapon in its current state.
The problem here is that basically everything is wire fraud. For instance if you wrote a lie to me on these forums with the intent to somehow enrich yourself, that could viably be seen as felony wire fraud - with up to 20 years in prison. Exaggerated credentials on a CV you sent by email? Wire fraud. Emailing in for sick leave when you're not? Wire fraud. Most of us have committed wire fraud, probably multiple times, throughout our lives. Obviously you're not going to be charge with wire fraud for those sort of things in practice, at least not unless the government wants to nail you. And I think that nuance of them just being able to tack on heavy charges at their discretion is quite undesirable.
That's not to say we should encourage lying or botting or whatever else, but they need their own statutes as opposed to a 50s era law which has turned into a catch-all superlaw with really harsh penalties. So in this case exactly what was the crime committed? Terms of service violations aren't illegal, neither is lying to or exploiting companies, neither is running bots. Wire fraud is dragged out exactly in circumstances like this when the government wants a conviction but it's not clear what law was broken, because even if no law was broken, they probably committed wire fraud, because everything is wire fraud.
A class-action lawsuit is "still being fought at the pleading stage" [1]. The way this often goes is prosecutors will watch the discovery in that case to decide if anyone committed a crime.
I'm reminded of the words of "Smokey" Yunick who said "I never cheated a day in my life. I just read the rules better than the people who wrote them."
That is what I see with this case. Aside from the debit card thing I am not certain any laws were broken. If making "bots and socks" to manipulate for profit is illegal there is a lot more areas that I would love to see them gone from.
Likely a ToS violation. But is this enough for a crime?
"“Michael Smith exploited super intelligence technology to generate a fraud,” said US Attorney Jamie McDonald. “By flooding music streaming platforms with automated bots in the place of consumers, and fake songs in the place of creativity, Smith robbed millions in royalty payments from genuine artists and their fans."
This state attorney does not seem to be the sharpest tool in the box or I don't get it.
1. I don't see any possible way how he could have stolen from the fans of the artists.
2. If he stole from the artists, then this must be a fixed amount of money in the pot and the slice of the piece of the cake gets smaller, if more people withdraw. There might be such an arrangement between artists and the streaming provider but I don't know details.
Literally the next full paragraph after your quote:
“Royalty payments are made proportionately to musicians and songwriters from a pool of funds. As a result, streaming fraud diverts funds from musicians and songwriters whose songs were legitimately streamed by real consumers to those who use automation to falsely create the appearance of legitimate streaming.”
NAL. My guess is it's debit card fraud plus everything else.
If the debit card fraud wasn't present, and it was instead a group of individuals doing this, I'm not sure if it would end up in criminal court. It could still end up in civil court.
The 'free' in free markets is a spectrum. A market without anyone enforcing limits will just coalesce to a couple large player(s), and won't remain free for long.
This is a common mistake technical people make when discussing legal topics: they look for technical compliance. I can see why. You try and prove that code works. You think about invariants, preconditions and postconditions.
The law doesn't work that way. So much of the law comes down to holistic and subjective tests. It looks at the totality of the evidence. Those tests typically also contain questions that are also tests.
Let me give you an example: the FBI gets access to a site hosting CSAM and, in doing so, they get IP logs. Many of those logs point to US IP addresses. From this they make arrests and prosecutions.
The typical engineer defense is "you can't prove that use of my IP was me", like you could've been hacked. While that's technically true, the law doesn't work on absolute certainty. Investigators and prosecutors will do things like figure out if you were home at the time, if there's any corroborating evidence on any of your devices and so on.
So back to streaming, you look at the totality of the accused's actions. Did he get mass copies of copyrighted music? As BS as IP is (IMHO), stealing it is still a crime. Using services within their ToS isn't a defense. And the fact that you committed a crime probably means you violated the ToS anyway. Dig in there and you'll probably find stuff about not doing things that aren't illegal.
Fraud: lying in the inducement or fulfilment of a contract.
If lying to induce or fulfil a contract were not a crime, someone could sell you a car telling you it has 0km, but it's actually 300km. Or they could sell you a hamburger telling you its made of meat, and it's actually made of soy. Etc..
Selling a song with 100M listens is a lie if you faked those 100M listens, it's not very different from stealing (but it is different)
> if you take advantage of the system as it was designed and gain a financial edge, you become a criminal—but if a major corporation does it, they just get a slap on the wrist.
You don't even need to be a major corporation to get away with it. You can be an individual if you have the right connections.
I believe what this guy did with the music streaming was wrong. But I also think whatever punishment he gets should be shared by someone who, say, lies about their 500 active user worthless company to unload it for tens of millions of dollars.
But one of these people is going to jail for a year and a half and one is preparing to launch a trillion+ dollar IPO.
> It turns out that now, if you take advantage of the system as it was designed and gain a financial edge, you become a criminal
Yes, exactly. Traditionally, fraud consists of lying to obtain something you wouldn't have gotten otherwise. This seems sensible, right?
But corpos have figured out how to abuse this - create a long list of business-method-desires in their "terms of service" (aka the legalese diarrhea that nobody reads). The corpos then take the position that merely by using their service as presented, users have take on responsibility for representing that they will abide by the listed whims. When it turns out that users' interests differ from the corpo's whims, and a user does something they majorly don't like, they cry fraud.
In the past, this was limited by the facts that 1. legalese diarrhea wasn't really involved in day to day transactions (we relied on legislative law made by public bodies rather than private law unilaterally promulgated by corpos) and 2. when you bought something, the seller's control over it simply ended. Both of those assumptions have been blown away by pervasive communications, and we really need some reform here.
Using bots to defraud the platforms and get royalties he didn’t actually earn sounds like a crime to me, but what do I know. Maybe I should just make a Trump joke.
I asked super intelligence to determine if a series converges or diverges yesterday. It said cos(1 + n * pi) is always positive for all n… I must be wrong, not the super intelligence.
"AI" is now an unword. The all-powerful delusional sociopath in the White House has decreed the latest bit of Newspeak, and the spineless cowards throughout the government are scrambling to make sure to stay in lockstep with The Party.
This U.S. Attorney is obviously frightened he'll be taken to re-education should he use banned terminology.
> By flooding music streaming platforms with automated bots in the place of consumers, and fake songs in the place of creativity, Smith robbed millions in royalty payments from genuine artists and their fans. This Office is committed to ensuring the integrity of all markets, and protecting the public from those who use super intelligence for fraud.
He certainly didn’t defraud artists or their fans. This is false framing. He defrauded the streaming platform, which I’m sure the jury would be far less empathetic towards.
This is true, but kind of on the streaming platforms for having a terrible pooled monetization scheme that lets high frequency users allocate the subscription money of low frequency users.
When has any Facebook executive ever gotten a prison sentence for their horrendous doings? They just pirated all of Anna's Archive to feed into their AI.
Our legal system has been turned into a tool to punish the poor and enrich the wealthy.
This man wasn't pirating though. He was using AI to generate listens on his own music so that streaming service algorithms would generate money for him. You can argue whether that is wrong or not, but the equivalent is not the AI piracy. It would be all the AI bots meta and so on use to generate activity on their platforms, but that's done to deceive their users, not to defraud a company. I mean, that company would be themselves.
Meta, Google and Apple are all currently claiming immunity in court for the explicitly illegal stuff they distribute and profit from - from scam ads and apps to illegal gambling apps.
I’m up for anyone and everyone pointing it out until it’s fixed. Which is hopefully one step on the path to action, which is on the path to change, and eventually resolution. Justice and fairness will be an ever present battle or at least vigilance.
I am not sure I understand. Surely a AI generated song isn't a "fake song"? Is it a crime to publish an AI generated song?
It seems that what he is guilty of is to generate some fake users pretending to listen to his songs, is that right? I can see how it is fraud, but how is it different from all the dark patterns used by newspapers to generate more page prints (like auto-refreshing pages)?
This actually doesn’t have anything to do with AI, especially since the scheme started in 2017.
The fraud is only possible because of the way the streaming revenue sharing is split. The way royalties are paid by streamers can basically be summed up by the equation: (total subscription revenue * some agreed to percentage) / total hours streamed by all subscribers for all songs * total hours your songs were streamed.
So let’s say total revenue is $1 million and the artists get 10% of revenue, and there is a total of 1 million hours of streamed music by those subscribers. This means that artists will earn 10 cents for every hour their song is streamed.
On the surface, this seems like a pretty fair way to distribute revenue.
However, what this means that a user who streams more will generate more revenue for artists than a user who streams less, even though the two users pay the same price for their subscription.
For example, imagine a streamer only has two customers, Bob and Alice. If Bob listens to 99 hours of Artist A, while Alice listens to 1 hour of Artist B, then Artist A will get 99 times as much revenue as Artist B, even though they both have one fan and they both pay the same.
So you can see how this could be abused; if I sign up for an account and have it stream my music 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, I am going to have more hours streamed than 20 average users, meaning I end up earning more revenue in royalties than I paid for my subscription (since even though I only get 10% of the revenue, my 20x the average subscriber volume means I end up with 2x my subscription cost in revenue)
If I do this thousands of times, I can make serious money… like this guy did, apparently.
There is a simple fix for this, and I think it actually makes it more fair for artists; do the revenue split on a per user basis. In other words, if 10% of revenue goes to the artists, you take 10% of an individual subscribers subscription price, and divide it up amongst all the artists that user streamed based on time streamed. For example, if my sub costs $10, $1 goes to the artists I stream. If I only listen to one artist, they get the $1 no matter how many hours I stream.
This ensures that a single user can never direct more than their own 10% to an artist, and you would have no incentive to stream your own music.
I agree thats more appropriate. There is nothing AI here, its just simple automation. Couple things that are probably applicable in this case or cases like this where royalties are earned based on assumed advertising traffic
1. There is no way he the the only one or first one. Chances are that more than likely he was subscribing to some third party services which were offering this feature.
2. He probably took it too far to get noticed and get in limelight
When you deliberately violate a TOS using deception in order to get money or property from a service, you're committing fraud.
There are plenty of ways to violate a TOS non-remuneratively or without using deception ("deception" is an element of the crime of fraud and has to be proved up in court; it's not simply what the TOS says it is). Those are civil matters, not crime.
The template you want to be working from: lying for money is fraud.
From what I've read they weren't AI generated songs of the kind that come to mind when most of us think of AI generated songs.
They were just simple short instrument loops (a basic drum machine beat, a short bass line, a few piano notes) repeating indefinitely, white noise, drones, and such.
If he used bots to stream his own song 80 million times then folks at the streaming services would notice. Instead he spread the 80 million fraudulent streams over tens of thousands of machine generated songs.
It's not. And a lot of this fraud was done with non-AI songs. But it helps show his attitude.
> It seems that what he is guilty of is to generate some fake users pretending to listen to his songs, is that right? I can see how it is fraud, but how is it different from all the dark patterns used by newspapers to generate more page prints (like auto-refreshing pages)?
Does that get them more money just for showing the ads? Usually the number of page views is up to you. If you find a way to make oodles of money off a mechanism like that, it very well might be criminal fraud!
> At times SMITH was using as many as 10,000 Bot Accounts at once to fraudulently stream music, and he used fake email accounts and fraudulently-obtained debit cards to create the Bot Accounts
I gather these are cards that he opened and funded, not stolen cards. I'm surprised at this scale it wasn't detected much sooner.
These accounts had to be listening a lot in order to generate more royalties than the subscription fees. e.g. Spotify family is $21.99/mo for six accounts. That's $440K annually for 10,000 accounts. Sheesh.
After talking at length with claude about this case it seems that while botting music streams does meet the bar for wire fraud, creating thousands of fake accounts on walmart to scalp pokemon cards does not. In my opinion these are the same thing, one just pays out from a shared royalty pool and the other on ebay. I guess that's a big difference from a legal perspective, but from a moral and technical perspective they're the same thing. Michael could have applied the same skills and made millions of dollars flipping GPU's and sneakers without any legal consequences. I'm not sure what the takeaway here is but something about this doesn't feel just to me.
With the Pokemon cards you are vaguely harming a nebulous population of other people who wanted to buy the cards from Walmart but won't get the opportunity. Walmart still earns the revenue, so it's hard to explain that you are "stealing" anything of value.
With fake bot streams it is pretty clearly stealing from the other artists who would otherwise get a greater share of the royalties pool. I see your point, but I really have to stretch my imagination to call them morally equivalent.
In terms of choosing the con, the guy calls himself a musician so he probably just fell into it. I bet there was a slippery slope effect: use bots "just a bit" at first to juice the algorithm for his own real songs. Then dabbling with AI generation to tweak the algorithm more, oh the royalty payments feel good, maybe a few more bots...
I am so going to force Gemini to consume as many google ads as google tries to foist on me. Brilliant idea. By their own definition that is just training right?
It says he robbed royalty payments which is true because of the way most of these services distribute royalties. All listens go into a global pool and count the same amount. So if you listen 20 hours a day, you control not only the royalty payments from your subscription but the royalty payments from several other people's subscriptions.
> ...(‘Super intelligence’ is the term that President Donald Trump has ordered government employees to use in documents and statements in the place of ‘artificial intelligence’.)
Because you as a user don't distribute your $15. It's not like if you listen to one artist only, that artist gets your $15. Instead they throw it all into one pot and distribute it in accordance to the total plays. This is why Taylor Swift gets most of your money even when you didn't listen to her. I wish it was different.
"Taylor Swift received 9.3 million streams on YouTube Music from family plan streams in April 2023., In the same month, Smith’s bot accounts used family plans to fraudulently stream his AI-generated music 80.9 million times."
what always fascinates me about crime like this is, if this guy hadn't tried to make 8 million dollars with 10k bot accounts and boosted himself straight to the top, he could have easily made a few thousand per month. How are people clever enough to set this scheme up to begin with but don't consider that you maybe shouldn't try to alert the entire fraud department
Meanwhile, other threads are blasting data centers for their energy consumption. At least that use seems like it should be somewhat efficient.
Bot armies ( trained to be inefficient to avoid detection ) streaming music over the wire en masse seems pretty wasteful. I wonder how many others are doing it?
The whole entire problem is the system that is used to divide the income from songs. If it it was "the share of your subscription (or whatever ad-supported account is worth) gets divided to the songs you listen", most of the problem would be gone, at the very least for money from subscription accounts.
Instead, it is all dumped in one big pool and distributed by total listens.
Which means, if you listen to more songs, you have more "voting power" on who gets the money. Absolutely asinine system.
Part of this does seem objectionable. But uhh, the other half, yikes. Superintelligence: ok for capital, not allowed for individuals.
> "Michael Smith exploited super intelligence technology to generate a fraud,” said U.S. Attorney Jamie McDonald. “By flooding music streaming platforms with automated bots in the place of consumers, and fake songs in the place of creativity, Smith robbed millions in royalty payments from genuine artists and their fans. This Office is committed to ensuring the integrity of all markets, and protecting the public from those who use super intelligence for fraud."
Wow, uh, he had a time machine?
> Smith’s streaming fraud lasted from 2017 to 2024
People here in HN seem to believe that royalty collecting companies are some sort of charitable organizations for the benefit of the artists. But their conduct and practices range from questionable [1] to outright fraudulent [2]. And now they manage to fly below the radar, because everyone (artists included) is busy bashing Spotify. These companies would sue Spotify out of existence had they offered the option to directly pay the artists instead of going through them.
Feels like some kind of sentence to make an example of someone to scare off other people ala going after grandmas for napster. There's way too much of this going on on instagram and tiktok etc etc already. They went after this guy but is letting many people get away with it.
From the indictment:
>SMITH’s streaming fraud lasted from 2017 to 2024 and he executed it in three steps. First, SMITH created thousands of fraudulent accounts on the Streaming Platforms (the “Bot Accounts”) that he could use to stream songs. Second, he used software to cause the Bot Accounts to continuously stream purported songs that he owned, which were generally created using super intelligence. Third, Smith collected royalties based on the fraudulent streams he orchestrated his own Bot Accounts to conduct.
>SMITH spread his automated streams across thousands of songs to avoid anomalous streaming as to any single song, which would likely cause the Streaming Platforms to discover his scheme. At times SMITH was using as many as 10,000 Bot Accounts at once to fraudulently stream music, and he used fake email accounts and fraudulently-obtained debit cards to create the Bot Accounts. As SMITH explained it in an email, he needed “a TON of songs fast” in order to circumvent the “anti fraud policies” of the Streaming Platforms. To obtain the necessary number of songs for his scheme to succeed, SMITH turned to super intelligence, which he used to create hundreds of thousands of AI-generated songs for which he could manipulate the streams.
So this isn't even "haha wouldn't it be funny if we make a 10 hour song that's just silence and then convince people to play it while they're sleeping", which would at least be vaguely legal. This is far closer to ad fraud.
What the... OK, I had to check if that language was in the indictment. It's not - https://www.justice.gov/usao-sdny/media/1366241/dl uses artificial intelligence. It's the press release from the Justice Department dated 6th of October that uses "super intelligence": https://www.justice.gov/usao-sdny/pr/north-carolina-man-sent...
Amusingly (and unsurprisingly) their earlier press release dated March 19th calls it "artificial intelligence": https://www.justice.gov/usao-sdny/pr/north-carolina-man-plea...
For example, pump-and-dumping .si domain names or some other asset which connects to the phrase/acronym.
That's literally what happened. Thousands of .si domains were bought up before his renaming, and then offered up for millions.
PS: His wife is from Slovenia. I'm sure that's a coincidence...
Like going from very successfully robbing banks to robbing convenience stores?
It doesn’t matter if it’s $10B or $59, more is more
In his speech about it at the UN: "Let's see if I have any power. Maybe I do, and maybe I don't. We're gonna find out pretty soon".
I get that politics is a team sport and all, but like the fraud and abuse Pelosi got away with is so infinitesimal compared to the absolute bald-faced grift. Did she "sell" cell-phones and then never deliver? In August alone Trump made a quarter billion dollars in securities trades.
Grow up.
Trump is a fraudster, rapist, thief, and traitor. He is a criminal of the basest sort.
It's a mistake to put them in the same category. It's a matter of kind, not a matter of degree.
SI-generated songs. [Now trump is angry](https://www.businessinsider.com/trump-super-intelligence-reb...)
I wouldn't be surprised if it was industry-pushed to try to get people used to the idea of "don't question the machine, let us replace you." Are you "super", after all?
I feel uncomfortable when we start handing out prison for things that are isomorphic in utility to things that seem clearly legal.
Which of these are fraud:
a) I block or skip ads in media I consume
b) 1000 people block or skip ads in media they consume
c) I convince 1000 humans to play my songs every day and all of them listen to the ads
d) I convince 1000 of humans to play my songs every day and all of them skip the ads
e) I program 1000 bots to play my songs every day
(b) (d) and (e) all have the same outcome for ad agencies, nobody hears the ads. If (e) is the only one that’s problematic, then we aren’t solving the problem by prosecuting (e).
Similar vein to Matt Levine’s “everything is securities fraud” takes.
you seem to be thinking of the legal system like some kind of programming language / logic paradigm and it is not that and never has been
most likely ad-blocking would also be considered some sort of fraud (or rather: companies would block using their services if the ads were not seen, and then circumventing that would be regarded as fraud) except that it is not politically/socially tenable to do that at all.
I don’t care if a service seeks civil remedy for any damages due to a breach of contract.
I also don’t fancy a future where people have to be worried about criminal penalties for spinning up a bunch of agents to automate something that enriches them.
Is buying likes and gh stars fraud? Is it okay if humans click the star button? Is it okay if a large distributed workload does it?
Anyway my actual stance is that it looks like in this case it’s not the bots that are the key focus of this matter so my earlier comment is mostly just a digression. And that I’d hope this case would be ruled similarly if for example human users were paid to stream his songs, however that would be adjudicated.
>a) I block or skip ads in media I consume
>b) 1000 people block or skip ads in media they consume
Not doing something is generally considered okay, even if it decreases someone else's revenue. eg. saying that a given product is a scam and not worth the money (assuming it's true). Same with skipping ads (eg. TiVo)
>c) I convince 1000 humans to play my songs every day and all of them listen to the ads
>d) I convince 1000 of humans to play my songs every day and all of them skip the ads
Legal, because the whole point of advertising is to convince people to do something, even if it costs someone else money (eg. drugs, which might cost your insurance provider money). Where you might get into trouble is if the actions turn out to be fraud, eg. telling people to stream music, even though no one's listening to it, for the sole purpose of getting streaming minutes, or setting up a kickback scheme (might be tortious interference). Again, going back to the drug example, it's pretty intuitive. Advertising a drug? That's fine. Telling people to buy your drug, just so they can chuck it into the trash, for the sole purpose of enriching yourself? Probably illegal.
d.1) convince humans and they use their main account
d.2) convince humans and they use and alt account
I think the resolution to my question is: it’s still fraud if humans do it, like you said. And it makes me wonder if more things should be considered fraud like paying people with free products for Amazon reviews or purchasing GH stars.
How is that fundamentally different from netflix or youtube auto-playing something after a video finishes, knowing that a large percentage of the people who started the first video won't be present or attentive to the second, in order to artificially inflate views for the content they're promoting.
2. caveat emptor. how youtube works and how ads are played is hardly secret information, so accusations that google is deceiving advertisers (not just providing a subpar product) is hard to make.
3. people have tried suing companies for this, but they were over securities fraud rather than deceiving ad buyers. No idea how successful they were though. it's worth noting that suing for securities fraud is easier because unlike with advertising, you have to declare risk factors, hence why every company's prospectus lists all potential list factors under the sun.
The intent of auto play on YouTube is not to defraud ad agencies
If your scheme doesn't extract value, nor costs anything to other parties, there is no victims, you can get away with it. Even if policies say no. The risk is termination of service.
Skipping ads is a loss of opportunity for advertisers. But they don't get extracted money. They may not like it, but they can continue to fish elsewhere and aren't being siphoned because you skip their ads.
If you spawn websites and farm fake viewers to scam ad networks, you are engaged in criminal activity. Not because you fake viewing ads. But because you extracted a profit of this activity which was extracted from another party (via deceits).
I suspect the case hinged on that, and everything else was legal, albeit part of the fraud, and was included as a complete description of the scheme.
To be fair, I'm guessing he couldn't have created the scale of fake accounts without debit card fraud, but creating multiple accounts, even if they're fake, is usually just a TOS violation, or maybe a civil matter, not criminal.
Yes, in and of itself, creating multiple accounts in violation of TOS is probably not a criminal fraud under either state or federal law.
But when you do it as the mechanism to conceal streaming manipulation in violation of the agreement that governs the terms of payment, and thereby to secure large amounts of money from the streaming service under false pretenses (and, given the structure of streaming payments, to deny payment to other song owners which they would have received without the deception) on the other hand is a different story.
Like yeah, flexing your index finger isn’t a crime, either, but if you are holding a gun with that finger on the trigger and the barrel pointed at someone's head...
The law very often is focussed more than anything about the purpose and effect of an action, and that you can ignore that and describe the action in terms that aren't criminal without considering purpose and effect really doesn't matter.
Using bots to automate listening to his own songs was likely fraudulent too because he was being awarded royalties. If his songs had been monetized in some other way I'm not sure what he did would be fraud.
I don't think creating multiple accounts is, even if it's in violation of the TOS.
If that was the case, anyone who signs up for multiple accounts on a website/app to get multiple coupons/bonuses/etc... would be committing fraud.
None of this is close to firing a gun pointed at someone's head.
They very clearly made an example of him given the sentencing, but I don't think they were confident about all the charges in the indictment based on the plea agreement and the crazy high succuss rates in federal criminal cases.
Edit: interesting it does look like there must be an object of the fraud, likely to prevent the law from being used broadly to punish lying.
That seems to me like it would be easy to prove it is fraud in a US court.
But I was responding to the comment touching on more general seemingly ambiguous situations.
What makes Terms of Service / contract violations a different case than deceit for financial profit. Why is one tolerated by justice but the other condemned as criminal activity.
But you are right, debit card fraud, wire fraud and the likes are clearly defined as criminal.
I lean fairly redistributive but through consensus and governance, not through fraud.
Collecting money from a platform by making bots play songs you created is fraud.
Making bots listen to a song without any financial incentive is not fraud.
If creating bots and mass-violating ToSes for financial gain is fraud while doing bot stuff for fun is totally fine, then clearly the AI companies should be treated like giant criminal cartels, should they not?
Aaron was threatening power structures, not enriching them.
And if you think skipping ads means the advertising agency gets screwed you are kind of showing ignorance...
Skip is fine. Blocking with third party tools is a breach of contract as a consumer, but not fraud nor a crime.
>b) 1000 people block or skip ads in media they consume.
If they individually decide to do this, then it's 1000 times fine or 1000 instances of breach of contract. If they get together and do this collectively, or are instructed to do so by one person, it starts to encroach on civil conspiracy.
>c) I convince 1000 humans to play my songs every day and all of them listen to the ads
If you convince them to play the songs on the basis of the music, that's the very object of the contract.
If you convince them to do so on the basis of the ads, presumably you incentivize them with money if they listen to the song, then it's fraud. It's arguable of course, but if you are paying the listeners, then it obviously makes the value of the ads 0, you are knowingly selling something that has 0 value and charging a comission for that sale.
>d) I convince 1000 humans to play my songs every day and all of them to skip the ads
d) This is weird because your revenue would be 0 in this case. But arguably you would be benefitting from the service of music distribution without paying for it with the cost of serving ads along your music. It's a completely different situation than the one in the OP, it's more like piracy, less like fraud.
Again if by skip you mean a service provider interface, then that's fine, I'm assuming you mean block with ublock or some third party reverse engineered thing that's forbidden by ToS.
>e) I program 1000 bots to play my songs every day
e) Of course this is fraud, I think it's obvious to you and you are just positing this as part of the obvious end of the slippery slope, so it's not worth explaining why. But just as a teaser, it involves agreeing and breaching 1000 contracts and creating 1000 fake identities, so identity fraud at least!
>(b) (d) and (e) all have the same outcome for ad agencies, nobody hears the ads. If (e) is the only one that’s problematic, then we aren’t solving the problem by prosecuting (e).
Regardless of the specific case, in general there's many cases where regulation attacks only some scenarios which cause a damage, and that's fine. For example drunk driving, driving too fast, and blinking at the wrong moment all might have the same consequence, but we only regulate the first and the second.
>Similar vein to Matt Levine’s “everything is securities fraud” takes.
Haven't read that, but this is strictly not securities fraud, just fraud.
Personally, I am not sure I consider pointing a bot at a service to use it, even if it enriches you, generally to be evil or fraud. I think now more than ever the concept of a bot is almost meaningless. So my angle with the comment is to talk about the spectrum and understand why people so clearly see (e) as criminal relative to the other situations when the harm or effective outcome is the same.
We seem generally okay with deception until it is used for personal enrichment. Why is that?
Should be a civil case. The readiness which with the United States incarcerates is a moral disgrace. Especially given the level of criminality the government itself exercises that goes unpunished.
Don't focus on the streaming revenue angle. Focus on the fact that this was a giant money-laundering exercise, allowing him to turn stolen debit cards into real money.
So what's your actual argument here? Is it
1. whatever he did isn't wire fraud?
2. whatever he did is wire fraud, but wire fraud shouldn't be prosecuted, similar to how crashing a car isn't prosecuted?
3. whatever he did is criminal and should be prosecuted, but trump is abusing his pardoning powers so every other white collar criminal should be off the hook?
I'll take all 3. It really doesn't matter. I don't want this person going to prison in my name. A criminal case is supposed to represent the public interest. A free society is meant to set a high bar to deprive someone of their liberty. The streaming platform can sue him if they like. A civil case that results in punitive damages is also understandable.
In my view, incarceration in this instance is a disgrace. The argument is a moral one, not a legalistic one.
Perhaps the statutes around wire fraud should be reformed. IDK it's not my area, and my argument doesn't rely on a legalistic interpretation, rather it suggests if the law's answer here is to put this person in prison something is wrong with the law. That is the argument. You seem to be asking me how would I codify the solution or else you have misunderstood me.
This was essentially money-laundering at scale.
I guess the state prosecution just disagreed on this matter, I'm assuming that, within their specialty, they take the top N cases and dismiss the other pettier cases, and in this case this case made the cut according to the workload capacity of the fraud prosecution workforce.
In raw stolen amounts, it's not small at all, it's like 8 million dollars, which is an amount that can be argued to be worth one or two lives, it may be the cost of complex surgeries and health insurance, or the cost for good nutrition, living space, so it could be argued that this person is taking those resources away from someone else, no matter how inert or ridiculous the means by which they stole that money may be. If someone defrauds 500 million dollars by impersonating a clown, the optics of defrauding 500 million should prevail over the optics of "putting someone in jail for being a clown".
Pointing a gun in someone's face is also not in the public interest.
Juicing some streaming numbers hurt who? Spotify's margin? It's not even clear to me without diving into the actual case where he went from getting an edge to engaging in the alleged crime. Or what he could have done differently to preclude criminal prosecution but could have still resulted in a civil case.
More importantly, why should he have to go to prison? Why don't you make that moral argument instead of engaging in such a misread of my position.
You don't seem to understand how the streaming revenue model works, and why this is an egregious fraud against the public interest. You believe that stream fraud is someone simply stealing from Spotify/YouTube/etc, so who cares.
In reality, all musicians share a pool of revenue across ads + subscriptions on each platform (typically two-thirds of the total, although each platform has a different rev share model).
This fraud only marginally impacts Spotify financials, as their cut is fixed and taken from the topline [1]. But someone abusing the system like this guy breaks the model for everyone. Not only you're stealing money from millions of musicians, but you're undermining the confidence in the whole industry.
I don't have an opinion if this merits jail time or not, but yes, this is pretty bad. Like money counterfeiting-bad.
[1] ps: of course, if this becomes rampant, musicians get screwed and turn against Spotify, so it's in their best interest to do whatever it take down the fraudsters. It's a never-ending cat-and-mouse game.
He used fraud to get a payout from Spotify. It's analogous to forging a check to get the bank to pay you money which you aren't owed.
What does this even mean? Only crimes against things are "regulated" should be prosecuted? Or "public interest", however vaguely that's defined?
>Juicing some streaming numbers hurt who? Spotify's margin?
Other artists. The subscriber/ad revenues are divided pro-rata (unclear whether it's by subscriber or across all subscribers), so by streaming a bunch of fake music, it's displacing the streaming minutes of other artists, ever so slightly.
Moreover, even if it is spotify that's losing money, how is it less in the "public interest" than banks? For the sake of argument let's subtract the threat of violence, and assume they hacked an ATM or something. Would that suddenly not be in the "public interest" to prosecute the offenders? Why should multi-billion dollar banks deserve more sympathy than multi-billion dollar tech companies, especially for crimes that in all likelihood won't lead to either company's demise?
I take it based on your other comments that the distinction between criminal and civil proceedings is suitably apparent to you?
If so I struggle to understand then why this leap is so hard for you.
You and I can have a private dispute without the government getting involved as a prosecuting party, yes? Banks are highly regulated because the state has sought fit to take an interest in how they are run. Roughly, because if a bank defrauds its numerous depositors this incurs a societal cost. Similarly, violence is also regulated, as it is inimical to the state's requisite monopoly on violence to tolerate private expressions of this power.
I simply do not get the intuition here that it is in the public interest to put this person in prison in the same way the intuition may surface in these other cases. If you disagree that is fine, but then I'm curious to hear where your intuition on this private vs public interest line is. Of course it is somewhat vague. If the public interest was clear and obvious to everyone electoral politics would not exist.
Can you offer a positive moral argument for incarceration in this case? Surely you are aware of principles around the burden of proof? Since you seem to be on the pro criminal prosecution side here why don't you take up the burden of saying you want this man to suffer in prison for his crime? I understand your frustration that I don't have all the answers. It would be a more impressive indictment if I was willing to send people to prison under such circumstances.
I take the burden of depriving a fellow citizen of their liberty in a free society rather seriously.
Do you? If so, please explain to me how you alleviate yourself of this burden in this case. I'm open to being persuaded.
If you can't clearly articulate what the "public interest" means, it just feels like this whole thing is just a long winded way for you to say that we shouldn't be prosecuting non-violent crimes, unless the victim is sufficiently sympathetic, in which case we throw the book at them. That's no way to run a justice system.
>Can you offer a positive moral argument for incarceration in this case? Surely you are aware of principles around the burden of proof? Since you seem to be on the pro criminal prosecution side here why don't you take up the burden of saying you want this man to suffer in prison for his crime? I understand your frustration that I don't have all the answers. It would be a more impressive indictment if I was willing to send people to prison under such circumstances.
You can make the same arguments about the questionable utility of incarceration for violent crimes too. The typical arguments against incarceration works equally well for violent crimes as they do for non-violent ones.
Less than 1/10 of restitution is ever paid out. When you send someone to jail, especially for a long time, you’re basically guaranteeing that they aren’t going to make good on any victim compensation.
So what does it mean for the movie trope where a hacker steals fractions of cents from everyone's bank account, leading him to get millions in loot? By any meaningful measure that didn't hurt anyone's bottom line, so that ought to be fine, right? Even if you think this is somehow okay, what about the "death by a thousands cuts" problem, where a trillion dollar company gets scammed 1000 times, which becomes a deleterious amount? Do you have to prosecute people at some point? How would that work?
To me, this falls under the category of white collar crime. I'm OK with white collar criminals serving time. It's not like this case is in a gray area. It's clearly a conspiracy to commit fraud on a large scale.
I get where you're coming from. It's not stealing. But, setting up fake accounts in order to trick Spotify into sending him money is clearly fraud.
To justify imprisonment (rather than purely monetary penalties or civil judgements) you really have to look at the relative scale of harm and the type of harm inflicted. Imprisonment doesn’t always make sense, there are many nonviolent crimes where a purely monetary penalty would be more appropriate. For one thing, imprisonment can prevent people from paying back the victim.
The reason the note works is banks don't want to pay the cost of having their employees getting their brains blown out. Passing a note with this understanding means one knows they are making a threat.
https://www.musicbusinessworldwide.com/spotify-denies-its-pl...
https://www.musicbusinessworldwide.com/remember-spotify-fake...
Same thing with big companies. They knowingly break the law because the punishment is less than what they gain from it. There’s no incentive not to break the law at that point.
Is "forfeit what you've got and go to jail for 18 months" harsher than that? I'd pick the one that let me get a clean start after.
And in the case that it wasn't spent, and by fine you mean as a replacement for any forfeiture, not in addition, then sibling comment has a great point that "if you get caught, you just gotta give it back" is an incentive to commit fraud, not one against committing fraud.
Prison for theft is so brutally cruel. Who was really harmed by this once he paid the money back? A line item in some megacorp that was lower for awhile?
No one felt anxiety or pain, the megacorp probably barely noticed. Pay them back with interest, move on.
Obviously the calculus changes for violent thefts, or breaking into someone's home. Those cause real emotional impacts to people. Of course simply returning those items doesn't make someone whole.
They stope millions of dollars through fraud and deception.
That absolutely deserves a prison sentence
And I don't think you do either. I think one could construct a suitably objective test that would relegate certain instances of this sort of fraud to the civil courts where I think they belong.
Part of the problem is conflating the private Spotify ecosystem with "the system" writ large. In any event, a civil case with appropriate punishment would serve to dissuade others from taking the same action.
What does adding a prison sentence accomplish?
He turned to what, exactly, Donnie?
> AI
Same sentence even lmao
I hate this timeline.
> ‘Super intelligence’ is the term that President Donald Trump has ordered government employees to use in documents and statements in the place of ‘artificial intelligence’.
Very disappointing.
If so, I think we can save America.
> ... SMITH turned to super intelligence...
Holy shit, we've got ASI?
Where do I go to invest all the money I have in this breakthrough!
It was made up one day and that's what govt publications must call it now.
> Where do I go to invest all the money I have in this breakthrough!
You get it.
The original purpose of the org was also explicitly defensive, with failing to prevent Pearl Harbor being an explicit influence for improving communication and cooperation between arms of the military through a combined leadership.
It's like recursively, fractally stupid.
However, using bots to collect royalties on the songs generated definitely fits within the definition of wire fraud as he was using electronic communications (i.e., the internet), to carry out a scheme to defraud streaming services of money.
So the bots he actually used were most likely illegal (though it's true other bots might not be).
If you and I have a contract that I’ll pay you for unique shoppers referred to my store and you just go in yourself to trigger the door counter 10,000 times wearing different disguises, it’s pretty clear that you have defrauded me.
In Kelly vs US [1] a couple of politicians were convicted of wire fraud for closing certain lanes to create a traffic jam for political benefit. It was overturned by the Supreme Court but that gets into interpretive arguments of what the statute means when it says "OR". The law isn't like code. Anyhow, yeah the wire fraud statute really needs to be rewritten or broken down into more appropriate and targeted statutes. But that will never happen because it's a superweapon in its current state.
[1] - https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/1343
[2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kelly_v._United_States
That's not to say we should encourage lying or botting or whatever else, but they need their own statutes as opposed to a 50s era law which has turned into a catch-all superlaw with really harsh penalties. So in this case exactly what was the crime committed? Terms of service violations aren't illegal, neither is lying to or exploiting companies, neither is running bots. Wire fraud is dragged out exactly in circumstances like this when the government wants a conviction but it's not clear what law was broken, because even if no law was broken, they probably committed wire fraud, because everything is wire fraud.
Are any major corporations doing something similar to this, play-botting to get other people's royalty money?
Fraud in larger scale and using other people's computers.
Was it ever prosecuted with the same vigour?
It's a corporation so I'm gonna bet no.
A class-action lawsuit is "still being fought at the pleading stage" [1]. The way this often goes is prosecutors will watch the discovery in that case to decide if anyone committed a crime.
[1] https://openclassactions.com/lawsuits/paypal-honey-affiliate...
If you ignore the keyword optimizing buzz-catcher press release, thats the crime right there. He used stolen debit card numbers to sign up accounts.
That is what I see with this case. Aside from the debit card thing I am not certain any laws were broken. If making "bots and socks" to manipulate for profit is illegal there is a lot more areas that I would love to see them gone from.
Go big or go to jail
"“Michael Smith exploited super intelligence technology to generate a fraud,” said US Attorney Jamie McDonald. “By flooding music streaming platforms with automated bots in the place of consumers, and fake songs in the place of creativity, Smith robbed millions in royalty payments from genuine artists and their fans."
This state attorney does not seem to be the sharpest tool in the box or I don't get it.
1. I don't see any possible way how he could have stolen from the fans of the artists.
2. If he stole from the artists, then this must be a fixed amount of money in the pot and the slice of the piece of the cake gets smaller, if more people withdraw. There might be such an arrangement between artists and the streaming provider but I don't know details.
“Royalty payments are made proportionately to musicians and songwriters from a pool of funds. As a result, streaming fraud diverts funds from musicians and songwriters whose songs were legitimately streamed by real consumers to those who use automation to falsely create the appearance of legitimate streaming.”
If the debit card fraud wasn't present, and it was instead a group of individuals doing this, I'm not sure if it would end up in criminal court. It could still end up in civil court.
No, far from it. A free market doesn’t have regulations, subsidies, tax incentives, bailouts, etc.
Fraud. https://xkcd.com/1494/
Fraud
He’s indicted for mass streaming his own songs to pump up the play count. It’s outright fraud.
The law doesn't work that way. So much of the law comes down to holistic and subjective tests. It looks at the totality of the evidence. Those tests typically also contain questions that are also tests.
Let me give you an example: the FBI gets access to a site hosting CSAM and, in doing so, they get IP logs. Many of those logs point to US IP addresses. From this they make arrests and prosecutions.
The typical engineer defense is "you can't prove that use of my IP was me", like you could've been hacked. While that's technically true, the law doesn't work on absolute certainty. Investigators and prosecutors will do things like figure out if you were home at the time, if there's any corroborating evidence on any of your devices and so on.
So back to streaming, you look at the totality of the accused's actions. Did he get mass copies of copyrighted music? As BS as IP is (IMHO), stealing it is still a crime. Using services within their ToS isn't a defense. And the fact that you committed a crime probably means you violated the ToS anyway. Dig in there and you'll probably find stuff about not doing things that aren't illegal.
If lying to induce or fulfil a contract were not a crime, someone could sell you a car telling you it has 0km, but it's actually 300km. Or they could sell you a hamburger telling you its made of meat, and it's actually made of soy. Etc..
Selling a song with 100M listens is a lie if you faked those 100M listens, it's not very different from stealing (but it is different)
You don't even need to be a major corporation to get away with it. You can be an individual if you have the right connections.
I believe what this guy did with the music streaming was wrong. But I also think whatever punishment he gets should be shared by someone who, say, lies about their 500 active user worthless company to unload it for tens of millions of dollars.
But one of these people is going to jail for a year and a half and one is preparing to launch a trillion+ dollar IPO.
> SMITH pled guilty to one count of conspiracy to commit wire fraud
the department of justice made a sophisticated music-themed plot around it because the only crime they had was too dumb
Yes, exactly. Traditionally, fraud consists of lying to obtain something you wouldn't have gotten otherwise. This seems sensible, right?
But corpos have figured out how to abuse this - create a long list of business-method-desires in their "terms of service" (aka the legalese diarrhea that nobody reads). The corpos then take the position that merely by using their service as presented, users have take on responsibility for representing that they will abide by the listed whims. When it turns out that users' interests differ from the corpo's whims, and a user does something they majorly don't like, they cry fraud.
In the past, this was limited by the facts that 1. legalese diarrhea wasn't really involved in day to day transactions (we relied on legislative law made by public bodies rather than private law unilaterally promulgated by corpos) and 2. when you bought something, the seller's control over it simply ended. Both of those assumptions have been blown away by pervasive communications, and we really need some reform here.
Super intelligence. Aha. :)
This U.S. Attorney is obviously frightened he'll be taken to re-education should he use banned terminology.
He certainly didn’t defraud artists or their fans. This is false framing. He defrauded the streaming platform, which I’m sure the jury would be far less empathetic towards.
Our legal system has been turned into a tool to punish the poor and enrich the wealthy.
When does he stop qualifying as the poor?
was it ever othrewise?
It seems that what he is guilty of is to generate some fake users pretending to listen to his songs, is that right? I can see how it is fraud, but how is it different from all the dark patterns used by newspapers to generate more page prints (like auto-refreshing pages)?
He is guilty of creating a bot farm to stream his music, to increase his user count to earn royalties, which is fraud.
The fraud is only possible because of the way the streaming revenue sharing is split. The way royalties are paid by streamers can basically be summed up by the equation: (total subscription revenue * some agreed to percentage) / total hours streamed by all subscribers for all songs * total hours your songs were streamed.
So let’s say total revenue is $1 million and the artists get 10% of revenue, and there is a total of 1 million hours of streamed music by those subscribers. This means that artists will earn 10 cents for every hour their song is streamed.
On the surface, this seems like a pretty fair way to distribute revenue.
However, what this means that a user who streams more will generate more revenue for artists than a user who streams less, even though the two users pay the same price for their subscription.
For example, imagine a streamer only has two customers, Bob and Alice. If Bob listens to 99 hours of Artist A, while Alice listens to 1 hour of Artist B, then Artist A will get 99 times as much revenue as Artist B, even though they both have one fan and they both pay the same.
So you can see how this could be abused; if I sign up for an account and have it stream my music 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, I am going to have more hours streamed than 20 average users, meaning I end up earning more revenue in royalties than I paid for my subscription (since even though I only get 10% of the revenue, my 20x the average subscriber volume means I end up with 2x my subscription cost in revenue)
If I do this thousands of times, I can make serious money… like this guy did, apparently.
There is a simple fix for this, and I think it actually makes it more fair for artists; do the revenue split on a per user basis. In other words, if 10% of revenue goes to the artists, you take 10% of an individual subscribers subscription price, and divide it up amongst all the artists that user streamed based on time streamed. For example, if my sub costs $10, $1 goes to the artists I stream. If I only listen to one artist, they get the $1 no matter how many hours I stream.
This ensures that a single user can never direct more than their own 10% to an artist, and you would have no incentive to stream your own music.
This seems fair and reasonable to me.
1. There is no way he the the only one or first one. Chances are that more than likely he was subscribing to some third party services which were offering this feature.
2. He probably took it too far to get noticed and get in limelight
There are plenty of ways to violate a TOS non-remuneratively or without using deception ("deception" is an element of the crime of fraud and has to be proved up in court; it's not simply what the TOS says it is). Those are civil matters, not crime.
The template you want to be working from: lying for money is fraud.
They were just simple short instrument loops (a basic drum machine beat, a short bass line, a few piano notes) repeating indefinitely, white noise, drones, and such.
Eh.
> Is it a crime to publish an AI generated song?
It's not. And a lot of this fraud was done with non-AI songs. But it helps show his attitude.
> It seems that what he is guilty of is to generate some fake users pretending to listen to his songs, is that right? I can see how it is fraud, but how is it different from all the dark patterns used by newspapers to generate more page prints (like auto-refreshing pages)?
Does that get them more money just for showing the ads? Usually the number of page views is up to you. If you find a way to make oodles of money off a mechanism like that, it very well might be criminal fraud!
I gather these are cards that he opened and funded, not stolen cards. I'm surprised at this scale it wasn't detected much sooner.
These accounts had to be listening a lot in order to generate more royalties than the subscription fees. e.g. Spotify family is $21.99/mo for six accounts. That's $440K annually for 10,000 accounts. Sheesh.
So the agencies are forced to pretend every ridiculous thing their king says is a great idea.
With fake bot streams it is pretty clearly stealing from the other artists who would otherwise get a greater share of the royalties pool. I see your point, but I really have to stretch my imagination to call them morally equivalent.
In terms of choosing the con, the guy calls himself a musician so he probably just fell into it. I bet there was a slippery slope effect: use bots "just a bit" at first to juice the algorithm for his own real songs. Then dabbling with AI generation to tweak the algorithm more, oh the royalty payments feel good, maybe a few more bots...
There is an asymmetry where paying to create an impression is much more expensive than paying to consume an impression.
The intelligence formerly known as...
They basically put all the revenue into one pot, then divide it by the songs play count.
Which means that account that streams 10 000 plays, have more "voting power" on the revenue that one that just listens "normally"
what always fascinates me about crime like this is, if this guy hadn't tried to make 8 million dollars with 10k bot accounts and boosted himself straight to the top, he could have easily made a few thousand per month. How are people clever enough to set this scheme up to begin with but don't consider that you maybe shouldn't try to alert the entire fraud department
> he used fake email accounts and fraudulently-obtained debit cards to create the Bot Accounts.
I think this is likely where the 18-month sentence comes from.
stupid idea!
Bot armies ( trained to be inefficient to avoid detection ) streaming music over the wire en masse seems pretty wasteful. I wonder how many others are doing it?
Try here: https://www.p3tips.com/Drill.aspx
Isn't that just "marketing"?
Instead, it is all dumped in one big pool and distributed by total listens.
Which means, if you listen to more songs, you have more "voting power" on who gets the money. Absolutely asinine system.
I need this guy’s lawyer
> "Michael Smith exploited super intelligence technology to generate a fraud,” said U.S. Attorney Jamie McDonald. “By flooding music streaming platforms with automated bots in the place of consumers, and fake songs in the place of creativity, Smith robbed millions in royalty payments from genuine artists and their fans. This Office is committed to ensuring the integrity of all markets, and protecting the public from those who use super intelligence for fraud."
Wow, uh, he had a time machine?
> Smith’s streaming fraud lasted from 2017 to 2024
People here in HN seem to believe that royalty collecting companies are some sort of charitable organizations for the benefit of the artists. But their conduct and practices range from questionable [1] to outright fraudulent [2]. And now they manage to fly below the radar, because everyone (artists included) is busy bashing Spotify. These companies would sue Spotify out of existence had they offered the option to directly pay the artists instead of going through them.
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/japan/comments/1302np/jasrac_this_i...
[2] https://torrentfreak.com/huge-scandal-engulfs-greek-anti-pir...