Man pleads guilty to $8M AI-generated music scheme
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therecord.media
This is just the same old view botting (aka click fraud) that has been going on for decades. The AI generated music aspect is irrelevant.
Click fraud is cut and dry wire fraud: Using electronic communications to deceptively steal money or property.
This guy is a visionary, the judges just don't get it.
All this guy did was break TOS, and find a broken business model. No fraud. Should have found a lawyer.
It’s wire fraud
Under the letter of the law, this is just a TOS violation.
He probably estimated the company would have noticed quickly if the fake listens were concentrated into a handful of real tracks. So machine generated audio was necessary to achieve the scale without detection.
You don’t have a stake in this game, I do.
Indie rights holders like me only get a slice of the revenues after Spotify pays like 75% to the RIAA firms. He gutted our pool. I’ll never see any of the pennies I’m rightfully owed even with great info from DistroKid.
I’ve come around. Copyright is dead, effectively. Just in time too. I WAS planning to sue Smart Communications for engaging in wholesale copyright infringement at scale, as they have unauthorized copies of poetry I wrote in jail - I have proof and trapped an asshole ex cop working for them into admitting they did what I suspected - but I’m moving on with life, still wounded, still sore.
Oh well, much bigger things are coming my way than worrying about money. Little people stand on piles of money to look big. They will never be able to look me eye to eye, as I’m a giraffe by comparison.
Facts.
I don't have data, but my gut feeling is that it would make a significant difference to niche artists with small but loyal listeners.
The ad revenue from the bots would be distributed. The same problem happens on Youtube.
Why don't we have a platform like that?
Does this behaviour open the door for ToS being abused? I have no legal expertise, but I would expect in cases like this that everyone would rationally come to the conclusion that the defendant's behaviour was wrong and unethical and the ToS just made it easy for the plaintiffs to point out to the court that they do in fact explicitly forbid such activities, making it an open and shut case.
From headlines I've seen of around ToS enforcement over the decades, courts don't seem to just view them the same as a physically signed legal agreement and will not enforce outrageous clauses in them.
It's the advertisers who paid for ads to get played to the bot accounts, and (depending on how the advertising deals were structured) other artists with legitimate listeners might have received smaller revenue cuts.
Consider the opposite view: if pretending to be a human is "criminal behavior" there are about 8 billion criminals walking around on this planet.. and in this case our current legal system appears to be hijacked for the protection of utterly nonsensical, hopelessly broken, ancient business models from a rent-seeking, anti-consumer, creator-exploiting, trillion-dollar corporate mafia, which would like nothing better than to track, spy, and force-feed their audience at every turn.
> At certain points, SMITH had as many as 10,000 active Bot Accounts on the Streaming Platforms
> Later, SMITH attempted to sell his fraudulent streaming scheme as a service, in which other musicians would pay him for streams he would fraudulently generate or share royalties with him in exchange for fraudulent streams of their music
> In or about 2018, SMITH began working with the Chief Executive Officer of an AI music company ("CC-3") and a music promoter ("CC-4") to create hundreds of thousands of songs using artificial intelligence that SMITH could then fraudulently stream.
What exactly is a “fake” email address here?
If I have three email addresses petethecoolone@gmail.com, joemama69@gmail.com, and michael.j.smith@gmail.com, are those “fake” as well, then? An email address doesn’t have to reflect your real name.
How about when I use iCloud Hide My Email to generate a unique email address when I create a new account somewhere? Is that a “fake” email address as well?
Or do they mean hacked email accounts that belonged to someone else? But then calling them “fake” email addresses still seems weird wording.
Fun fact: Gmail address prefixes can optionally intercalate a period between any letters. All accounts though must be remain unique after normalizing case and removing all periods.
a.bc@ = ab.c@ = a.b.c@ = abc@, but only one of these can be registered.
Periods are optional.
Edit: Woops yeah, meant pluses. Dots are somewhat common as optional these days but not universal.
> Dots are somewhat common as optional these days but not universal.
This handwaving tautology is meaningless.
yourname+amazon@gmail.com
yourname+etsy@gmail.com
yourname+itunes@gmail.com
Big players defraud the common people -> no prosecution
Common man defrauds the big players -> prosecution
> AT&T “unlimited” mobile plans
https://www.att.com/plans/unlimited-data-plans/
There's a huge bolded disclaimer literally in the middle of the page which says "AT&T may temporarily slow data speeds if the network is busy."
> Purdue Pharma's OxyContin push
Forced to file for chapter 11
> Juul marketing vaping products as a "safer alternative" to smoking
It is strictly true that the vaping products sold by Juul are vastly safer than smoking.
> Facebook's sale of user data to Cambridge Analytica
Not fraud.
> Wells Fargo opening fake accounts for people
https://www.justice.gov/archives/opa/pr/wells-fargo-agrees-p...
Huge penalties far exceeding their gains from this scheme conducted exclusively by low-level employees.
How many Sacklers are in jail for what they did to people? None. Purdue pleaded guilty, but no Sackler family member went to jail. The settlement totals about $7.4 billion, with roughly $6.5–$7 billion coming from the Sacklers and about $900 million from Purdue. Earlier estimates put the family's wealth around $11 billion, so they remain enormously wealthy. Hundreds of thousands have died in the opioid crisis, ruined families got no real justice, and no Sackler went to prison... great punishment.
Perhaps none of them personally engaged in conduct that merits a prison sentence? Which of the Sacklers do you believe should have been charged, and for what conduct?
> Earlier estimates put the family's wealth around $11 billion, so they remain enormously wealthy
Why wouldn't they? The company had been around for a hundred years
I see no victims other than large streaming services who failed to account for a changing reality.
I’m getting ‘because of torrenting metallica won’t be able to afford its third private jet’ vibes from this
Whereas with pirating by downloading a song, the "damage" is completely hypothetical, it's not like the downloader got actual money from doing the download and it's far from certain they would have paid the normal fee if the piracy option was not available. It's unproveable that the publisher actually lost any money from the activity.
However, hosting a website offering piracy through listing of e.g. torrents where they make significant money from ad-revenue is clearly a case of you profiting off the work of others, but it's probably still a bit grey in terms of linking the harm to the rights holder.
What's an open and closed case though is any subscription service where the website charges users in some form which grants them access to media they don't have a license to distribute and to which they don't compensate the rights holder.
It's the difference between violating a no skateboarding sign in front of a shopping mall versus a no trespassing sign at a military base. They're both "just signs", right?
But I don't see how it's fraud in the criminal sense. That's just my judgement as a citizen, not a lawyer. All I see is the shopping mall shaping criminal law to its own benefit.
As for the military bases, yeah, stay away from those, kids.
Fraud is just any time you intentionally deceive someone for material gain. Even without the ToS this would presumably still qualify as fraud. The ToS just makes it more straightforward to argue (IIUC, IANAL, etc).
A decent rule of thumb is that if your hack or neat trick results in money in your bank account that the other party wouldn't have paid out to you had they been aware of what was happening then you are almost certainly committing a felony of some sort.
Napster Bad: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=fS6udST6lbE (a classic)
Spotify clearly communicates that this is not allowed.
Sometimes yes, sometimes no.
That said, some good can come of this in the sense that it will (hopefully) discourage these kind of schemes. They don't create value and they harm smaller competitors, who now need to divert resources to increasingly sophisticated bot detection.
What problems do you see in the indictment? https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.nysd.62...
The steps he took to conceal his activities certainly seem to suggest that he was intentionally deceptive.
Wow!