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Comment by godwinson__4-8 | Hacker News Reader

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.

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> 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.

As already discussed in other places in this article Spotify chose this model and could well choose one that cannot be abused this way. Why does it need protection by the criminal justice system.

What does it have to do with the crime at hand? Spotify is not asking for special protection. Someone defrauded thousands of musicians; it's the justice's job to step in and ensure markets operate fairly. This is working as intended.

Also, this is not (just) about Spotify; all streaming platforms have some sort of subscription and/or ad revshare, and were abused by the same fraudster.

Per the original case: "Music can be streamed through platforms such as Amazon Music, Apple Music, Spotify, and YouTube Music... SMITH created thousands of fraudulent accounts on the Streaming Platforms that he could use to stream songs".

> Juicing some streaming numbers hurt who?

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.

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?

> What does this even mean?

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.

Yeah, I think they are arguing that white collar crimes should not result in prison sentences.

They actually don't result in prison (if you are president-elect).

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?

Sounds like a great case for restitution, penalty, and community service, like I described in the post you literally just replied to.

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.

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