Our legal system has been turned into a tool to punish the poor and enrich the wealthy.

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.

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.

>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. 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).

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?

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

The prosecutor is clearly a low IQ individual

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.

Are any major corporations doing something similar to this, play-botting to get other people's royalty money?

No, far from it. A free market doesn’t have regulations, subsidies, tax incentives, bailouts, etc.

Fraud. https://xkcd.com/1494/

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.

I need this guy’s lawyer

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.

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.

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.

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.

So the agencies are forced to pretend every ridiculous thing their king says is a great idea.

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

Try here: https://www.p3tips.com/Drill.aspx

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...