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.