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▲US man given prison sentence for bot-farming music streams (thequietus.com)
sowhat1 13 minutes ago [-]
When has any Facebook executive ever gotten a prison sentence for their horrendous doings? They just pirated all of Anna's Archive to feed into their AI.

Our legal system has been turned into a tool to punish the poor and enrich the wealthy.

benoau 9 minutes ago [-]
Meta, Google and Apple are all currently claiming immunity in court for the explicitly illegal stuff they distribute and profit from - from scam ads and apps to illegal gambling apps.
dclavijo 19 hours ago [-]
Here’s what bothers me: isn’t the United States a free market? What crime did he actually commit? Using services exactly as they are offered? It turns out that now, if you take advantage of the system as it was designed and gain a financial edge, you become a criminal—but if a major corporation does it, they just get a slap on the wrist.
gruez 1 hours ago [-]
>isn’t the United States a free market? What crime did he actually commit? Using services exactly as they are offered?

From the indictment:

>SMITH’s streaming fraud lasted from 2017 to 2024 and he executed it in three steps. First, SMITH created thousands of fraudulent accounts on the Streaming Platforms (the “Bot Accounts”) that he could use to stream songs. Second, he used software to cause the Bot Accounts to continuously stream purported songs that he owned, which were generally created using super intelligence. Third, Smith collected royalties based on the fraudulent streams he orchestrated his own Bot Accounts to conduct.

>SMITH spread his automated streams across thousands of songs to avoid anomalous streaming as to any single song, which would likely cause the Streaming Platforms to discover his scheme. At times SMITH was using as many as 10,000 Bot Accounts at once to fraudulently stream music, and he used fake email accounts and fraudulently-obtained debit cards to create the Bot Accounts. As SMITH explained it in an email, he needed “a TON of songs fast” in order to circumvent the “anti fraud policies” of the Streaming Platforms. To obtain the necessary number of songs for his scheme to succeed, SMITH turned to super intelligence, which he used to create hundreds of thousands of AI-generated songs for which he could manipulate the streams.

So this isn't even "haha wouldn't it be funny if we make a 10 hour song that's just silence and then convince people to play it while they're sleeping", which would at least be vaguely legal. This is far closer to ad fraud.

dcow 7 minutes ago [-]
I find this fascinating, actually. On one hand we must disincentivize fraud. On the other hand enforcement of laws really should have observable utility and not feel arbitrary. I’m much more on the “fix the model” side of the spectrum on this one. That doesn’t mean I think we should allow what SMITH did.

I feel uncomfortable when we start handing out prison for things that are isomorphic in utility to things that seem clearly legal.

Which of these are fraud:

a) I block or skip ads in media I consume

b) 1000 people block or skip ads in media they consume

c) I convince 1000 humans to play my songs every day and all of them listen to the ads

d) I convince 1000 of humans to play my songs every day and all of them skip the ads

e) I program 1000 bots to play my songs every day

(b) (d) and (e) all have the same outcome for ad agencies, nobody hears the ads. If (e) is the only one that’s problematic, then we aren’t solving the problem by prosecuting (e).

Similar vein to Matt Levine’s “everything is securities fraud” takes.

godwinson__4-8 1 hours ago [-]
None of this merits a prison sentence to me.

Should be a civil case. The readiness which with the United States incarcerates is a moral disgrace. Especially given the level of criminality the government itself exercises that goes unpunished.

gruez 55 minutes ago [-]
>Should be a civil case. The readiness which with the United States incarcerates is a moral disgrace. Especially given the level of criminality the government itself exercises that goes unpunished.

So what's your actual argument here? Is it

1. whatever he did isn't wire fraud?

2. whatever he did is wire fraud, but wire fraud shouldn't be prosecuted, similar to how crashing a car isn't prosecuted?

3. whatever he did is criminal and should be prosecuted, but trump is abusing his pardoning powers so every other white collar criminal should be off the hook?

godwinson__4-8 36 minutes ago [-]
What part of doesn't merit a prison sentence escapes you?

I'll take all 3. It really doesn't matter. I don't want this person going to prison in my name. A criminal case is supposed to represent the public interest. A free society is meant to set a high bar to deprive someone of their liberty. The streaming platform can sue him if they like. A civil case that results in punitive damages is also understandable.

In my view, incarceration in this instance is a disgrace. The argument is a moral one, not a legalistic one.

Perhaps the statutes around wire fraud should be reformed. IDK it's not my area, and my argument doesn't rely on a legalistic interpretation, rather it suggests if the law's answer here is to put this person in prison something is wrong with the law. That is the argument. You seem to be asking me how would I codify the solution or else you have misunderstood me.

tantalor 20 minutes ago [-]
Your argument: If somebody robs a bank, they did not harm society, the bank can just sue them to recover the money.
godwinson__4-8 11 minutes ago [-]
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.

iamnothere 15 minutes ago [-]
Bank robbery typically involves violence or the threat of violence. I don’t think the two are really comparable.

To justify imprisonment (rather than purely monetary penalties or civil judgements) you really have to look at the relative scale of harm and the type of harm inflicted. Imprisonment doesn’t always make sense, there are many nonviolent crimes where a purely monetary penalty would be more appropriate. For one thing, imprisonment can prevent people from paying back the victim.

fragmede 51 minutes ago [-]
It matters who you're stealing from. And if you're undermining the system itself. This is why counterfeiting currency is considered such a serious crime. If I photocopy a $1 bill, I get, what, $1 for free? That's not that big a deal. But because having fake currency in circulation undermines the entire system, and thus makes for serious crime, so, too, does having fake listeners and getting rich of the royalties. Who cares if Spotify's CEO can't get buy forest in Sweden, in duping the system, it undermines the drive for real actual human people to create music that other actual human people want to listen to. That there are other injustices on the world doesn't undermine this injustice being addressed.
godwinson__4-8 28 minutes ago [-]
I simply don't buy that this is like copying a $1 bill.

And I don't think you do either. I think one could construct a suitably objective test that would relegate certain instances of this sort of fraud to the civil courts where I think they belong.

Part of the problem is conflating the private Spotify ecosystem with "the system" writ large. In any event, a civil case with appropriate punishment would serve to dissuade others from taking the same action.

What does adding a prison sentence accomplish?

iAMkenough 47 minutes ago [-]
If he has access to super intelligence, he shouldn’t need to scam those poor corporations.
cyberpunk 1 hours ago [-]
They actually used the term super intelligence.

I hate this timeline.

49 minutes ago [-]
rpdillon 1 hours ago [-]
Article mentions they've been ordered to:

> ‘Super intelligence’ is the term that President Donald Trump has ordered government employees to use in documents and statements in the place of ‘artificial intelligence’.

Very disappointing.

charlieflowers 55 minutes ago [-]
Surprised it is not "Super Intelligence of America"
cdrnsf 44 seconds ago [-]
That's Lake Super Intelligence to you.
NDlurker 58 minutes ago [-]
I stopped reading after "super intelligence"

The prosecutor is clearly a low IQ individual

wrs 54 minutes ago [-]
The prosecutor is an employee of the executive branch, so use of that term is unfortunately not optional.
BoxOfRain 26 minutes ago [-]
How much power does this actually have in the US? I remember here in the UK when Jacob Rees-Mogg (a man known for his dedication to traditionalism) required that his staff follow a fussy style guide demanding all non-titled men be addressed as Esq and to use imperial units. As far as I'm aware, it never stuck.
Legend2440 11 minutes ago [-]
It has immense power over federal employees and exactly zero power over anyone else.
garciasn 1 hours ago [-]
Generating the AI music wasn't illegal. Using bots to inflate /listens/ of an AI-generated song probably is against a platform's TOS, but isn't inherently illegal.

However, using bots to collect royalties on the songs generated definitely fits within the definition of wire fraud as he was using electronic communications (i.e., the internet), to carry out a scheme to defraud streaming services of money.

Dylan16807 1 hours ago [-]
The crime is fraud, and if he was using the service as offered he wouldn't have thousands of accounts pretending to be different people.

Are any major corporations doing something similar to this, play-botting to get other people's royalty money?

janalsncm 58 minutes ago [-]
> isn’t the United States a free market

No, far from it. A free market doesn’t have regulations, subsidies, tax incentives, bailouts, etc.

derekerdmann 1 hours ago [-]
> What crime did he actually commit?

Fraud. https://xkcd.com/1494/

bsoqk 1 hours ago [-]
Using bots to defraud the platforms and get royalties he didn’t actually earn sounds like a crime to me, but what do I know. Maybe I should just make a Trump joke.
mindslight 60 minutes ago [-]
> It turns out that now, if you take advantage of the system as it was designed and gain a financial edge, you become a criminal

Yes, exactly. Traditionally, fraud consists of lying to obtain something you wouldn't have gotten otherwise. This seems sensible, right?

But corpos have figured out how to abuse this - create a long list of business-method-desires in their "terms of service" (aka the legalese diarrhea that nobody reads). The corpos then take the position that merely by using their service as presented, users take on responsibility for abiding by the whims they've listed. When it turns out that users' interests differ from the corpo's whims, and a user doing something they majorly don't like, they cry fraud.

In the past, this was limited by the facts that 1. legalese diarrhea wasn't really involved in day to day transactions (we relied on legislative law made by public bodies rather than private law unilaterally promulgated by corpos) and 2. when you bought something, the seller's control over it simply ended. Both of those assumptions have been blown away by pervasive communications, and we really need some reform here.

dessimus 1 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
tintor 1 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
cm2187 1 hours ago [-]
I am not sure I understand. Surely a AI generated song isn't a "fake song"? Is it a crime to publish an AI generated song?

It seems that what he is guilty of is to generate some fake users pretending to listen to his songs, is that right? I can see how it is fraud, but how is it different from all the dark patterns used by newspapers to generate more page prints (like auto-refreshing pages)?

RobRivera 1 hours ago [-]
He is not guilt of using AI to create songs.

He is guilty of creating a bot farm to stream his music, to increase his user count to earn royalties, which is fraud.

hackingonempty 8 minutes ago [-]
If he used bots to stream his own song 80 million times then folks at the streaming services would notice. Instead he spread the 80 million fraudulent streams over tens of thousands of machine generated songs.
60 minutes ago [-]
MPSimmons 1 hours ago [-]
Seems like a ToS violation more than anything
sandeepkd 1 hours ago [-]
I agree thats more appropriate. There is nothing AI here, its just simple automation. Couple things that are probably applicable in this case or cases like this where royalties are earned based on assumed advertising traffic

1. There is no way he the the only one or first one. Chances are that more than likely he was subscribing to some third party services which were offering this feature.

2. He probably took it too far to get noticed and get in limelight

tptacek 11 minutes ago [-]
When you deliberately violate a TOS using deception in order to get money or property from a service, you're committing fraud.

There are plenty of ways to violate a TOS non-remuneratively or without using deception ("deception" is an element of the crime of fraud and has to be proved up in court; it's not simply what the TOS says it is). Those are civil matters, not crime.

The template you want to be working from: lying for money is fraud.

watwut 7 minutes ago [-]
Unless you are facebook, Musk, OpenAI, Antropic, Thiel, ...
vasco 25 minutes ago [-]
There's illicit enrichment so it's not like just getting likes.
Dylan16807 1 hours ago [-]
> Surely a AI generated song isn't a "fake song"?

Eh.

> Is it a crime to publish an AI generated song?

It's not. And a lot of this fraud was done with non-AI songs. But it helps show his attitude.

> It seems that what he is guilty of is to generate some fake users pretending to listen to his songs, is that right? I can see how it is fraud, but how is it different from all the dark patterns used by newspapers to generate more page prints (like auto-refreshing pages)?

Does that get them more money just for showing the ads? Usually the number of page views is up to you. If you find a way to make oodles of money off a mechanism like that, it very well might be criminal fraud!

drivebyhooting 1 hours ago [-]
> By flooding music streaming platforms with automated bots in the place of consumers, and fake songs in the place of creativity, Smith robbed millions in royalty payments from genuine artists and their fans. This Office is committed to ensuring the integrity of all markets, and protecting the public from those who use super intelligence for fraud.

He certainly didn’t defraud artists or their fans. This is false framing. He defrauded the streaming platform, which I’m sure the jury would be far less empathetic towards.

LPisGood 1 hours ago [-]
The money he got came from the same shared pool that the other artists get money from.
deeponey 52 minutes ago [-]
This is true, but kind of on the streaming platforms for having a terrible pooled monetization scheme that lets high frequency users allocate the subscription money of low frequency users.
js2 57 minutes ago [-]
> At times SMITH was using as many as 10,000 Bot Accounts at once to fraudulently stream music, and he used fake email accounts and fraudulently-obtained debit cards to create the Bot Accounts

I gather these are cards that he opened and funded, not stolen cards. I'm surprised at this scale it wasn't detected much sooner.

These accounts had to be listening a lot in order to generate more royalties than the subscription fees. e.g. Spotify family is $21.99/mo for six accounts. That's $440K annually for 10,000 accounts. Sheesh.

41 minutes ago [-]
Waterluvian 58 minutes ago [-]
Oh lord. “Super Intelligence”

So the agencies are forced to pretend every ridiculous thing their king says is a great idea.

bear141 1 hours ago [-]
The part saying he robbed streams from legitimate artists and fans is quite stupid but expected in a case like this.
Dylan16807 1 hours ago [-]
It says he robbed royalty payments which is true because of the way most of these services distribute royalties. All listens go into a global pool and count the same amount. So if you listen 20 hours a day, you control not only the royalty payments from your subscription but the royalty payments from several other people's subscriptions.
iamacyborg 1 hours ago [-]
If there was a sane payment system for spotify it would be literally impossible for that to be the case.
podgietaru 58 minutes ago [-]
The AI is incidental to the story. The fraud is the fake streams for money.
OutOfHere 8 minutes ago [-]
I wonder if he would have gotten away with it if only he had stayed under well the radar.
PHGamer 29 minutes ago [-]
the crime isnt the AI music its the fake views isnt it? i hate how the titles are being framed here
moneytide1 18 minutes ago [-]
A digital society takes the value out of a place. There was a time when, if you did not Show Up, you were always alone.
Barrin92 32 minutes ago [-]
"Taylor Swift received 9.3 million streams on YouTube Music from family plan streams in April 2023., In the same month, Smith’s bot accounts used family plans to fraudulently stream his AI-generated music 80.9 million times."

what always fascinates me about crime like this is, if this guy hadn't tried to make 8 million dollars with 10k bot accounts and boosted himself straight to the top, he could have easily made a few thousand per month. How are people clever enough to set this scheme up to begin with but don't consider that you maybe shouldn't try to alert the entire fraud department

fragmede 16 minutes ago [-]
which is to say there probably is someone out there who is committing this crime and being less greedy and getting away with it.
casey2 1 hours ago [-]
Sam Altman is hiding tons of evidence of OpenAI's crimes. DOJ please investigate
criddell 1 hours ago [-]
DOJ doesn't monitor this site.

Try here: https://www.p3tips.com/Drill.aspx

roosterIllusi0n 1 hours ago [-]
This arrest was in 2024. This is the last remnants of a justice system being sunsetted.
2OEH8eoCRo0 1 hours ago [-]
How is that not protected by the first amendment?
LPisGood 1 hours ago [-]
He was doing it fraudulently to make money.
2OEH8eoCRo0 1 hours ago [-]
I thought using bots in a misleading and inauthentic way was free speech. What about Elon's stock pumping twitter bots?
LPisGood 1 hours ago [-]
That may be true by itself. However, misleading and inauthentic speech to make money is fraudulent and illegal.
nemomarx 1 hours ago [-]
Who said those are legal? I'm sure that could be securities or wire fraud.
seb1204 56 minutes ago [-]
I'd like to read more about this court case
LiquidSky 57 minutes ago [-]
Imagine showing this headline to someone in the 80s or before.
jauntywundrkind 1 hours ago [-]
Part of this does seem objectionable. But uhh, the other half, yikes. Superintelligence: ok for capital, not allowed for individuals.

> "Michael Smith exploited super intelligence technology to generate a fraud,” said U.S. Attorney Jamie McDonald. “By flooding music streaming platforms with automated bots in the place of consumers, and fake songs in the place of creativity, Smith robbed millions in royalty payments from genuine artists and their fans. This Office is committed to ensuring the integrity of all markets, and protecting the public from those who use super intelligence for fraud."

Wow, uh, he had a time machine?

> Smith’s streaming fraud lasted from 2017 to 2024

m000 44 minutes ago [-]
Won't somebody please think of the artists? /s

People here in HN seem to believe that royalty collecting companies are some sort of charitable organizations for the benefit of the artists. But their conduct and practices range from questionable [1] to outright fraudulent [2]. And now they manage to fly below the radar, because everyone (artists included) is busy bashing Spotify. These companies would sue Spotify out of existence had they offered the option to directly pay the artists instead of going through them.

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/japan/comments/1302np/jasrac_this_i...

[2] https://torrentfreak.com/huge-scandal-engulfs-greek-anti-pir...

tqi 56 minutes ago [-]
Feels like this is missing the bigger story, that this guy was using ai (AI!) to generate music in 2017-2024! /s
dcow 56 minutes ago [-]
Genuine question: what if my agents produce better output if I stream audio to them while they work? Is that fraud?
qoez 1 hours ago [-]
Feels like some kind of sentence to make an example of someone to scare off other people ala going after grandmas for napster. There's way too much of this going on on instagram and tiktok etc etc already. They went after this guy but is letting many people get away with it.
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