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Comment by jsheard | Hacker News Reader

The buried lede is that he was botting fake listeners on his songs to fraudulently boost his payouts, which was the illegal part. Just spamming Spotify with AI dreck and hoping that real people listened to it would have been (legally) fine, but not as lucrative.

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The real strategy is to put it all in a number of playlists then use AI/cheap promo accounts to promote them on search engines and social media.

Don’t let the entertainment business find out - they might just start doing that.

Sounds like the formula for pop idol.

Honest question: what makes the botting illegal? Wouldn't it just be a ToS violation?

It's fraud involving a large sum of money.

Stealing money is illegal, the way you do it is often secondary to that fact. In many countries, hacking or breaking systems, whether digital or analog, is punishable by law. I'm not sure there's much of a surprise here.

I think what OP is asking is, the "system" says we will pay you money for every download of your song from our system. He automated the song download process at scale.

The system says it will pay you every time a person streams your song to listen to it. That's not what happened.

Guess it depends on the wording (hence the lawsuit). It's an open secret that so many "views" on such platforms are in fact inorganic. That's why the internet been ruined by trackers to try and reassure the poor ad companies can prove humans are looking at ads (i imagine as AI rises this sentiment becomes less relevant).

This is definitely the highest profile case I've seen of this, though.

He, a person, streamed the songs. I don't know if this person played the song over a speaker or not that he was able to listen to.

Maybe if he had formed a shell corporation around his fake listeners, that would have been OK because according to the US Supreme Court, corps are peeps!

Yeah in the sense that the airline says that it’ll fly you in the air and the 9/11 hijackers just decided they’d do that themselves for a bit so why prosecute Bin Laden?

It turns out that the other bits of the deal also matter.

Was Bin Laden prosecuted? I thought he was just executed.

Well they prosecuted war against him.

There's plenty of precedent for ad click fraud being prosecuted as criminal wire fraud, and faking listeners is basically the same scam.

"Conspiracy to commit wire fraud" according to the FBI's indictment.

pdf here - https://www.justice.gov/usao-sdny/pr/north-carolina-musician...

Apparently ToS violation becomes wire fraud when you (only you, and not corporations) use it to make money.

Citizens United ruling basically said that corporations have more rights than actual people. Sure it gives them "the same" speech rights as meat-people, but when you're a corporation you have way more resources at your disposal to get your speech to more places than meat-people can muster.

Most stream fraud schemes like this use stolen accounts or accounts made with stolen credit cards.

As for what makes the botting illegal, in this case its theft through misrepresentation. He was charged with wire fraud conspiracy, wire fraud, and money laundering conspiracy.

https://www.justice.gov/usao-sdny/pr/north-carolina-musician...

This seems no worse than what Deutsche Ban and Wells Fargo have been caught doing. I think maybe his mistake was not doing this through corporate obfuscation at a large enough scale. Although Bankman-Fried and Madoff got punished with prison time, they threatened the wealthy with their fraud so steering clear of that has to be taken into account.

Pretty much. If you're a billion dollar CEO we called this an "oopsie". It's only a crime if another billion dollar CEO chooses to fight.

money was involved. it didn't help that he incriminated himself with such statements as " We need to get a TON of songs fast to make this work around the anti-fraud policies these guys are all using now.”

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