Comment by gruez | Hacker News Reader

Comment by gruez | Hacker News Reader

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>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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