Flooding stream services with slop and autoplaying it through a bot farm is obviously bad behavior, but is it illegal, punishable with jail time (5 years mentioned)?
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
He indisputably defrauded $8M from these companies by "tricking" them into giving it to him.
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.
There's intent, deception, and damages so it's definitely fraud. This isn't a mundane matter of creatively using someone's API in a way they don't like. He came up with a scheme to extract money from them. The ToS is the contract governing payments in this case (IIUC).
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?
Oh I don't deny what he did is most likely a ToS violation. And under those terms, he should probably be forced to pay back the money.
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.
The point is that it doesn't matter what you call the contract. You're thinking "oh that's just a sign" (ie ToS). Your error is that not all signs are equal. The 8 million dollars is the military base in this analogy. Being prosecuted for violating this ToS under these conditions is not interchangeable with others.
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.
I guess forging documents and selling you a house which I don't own shouldn't be an actual crime either? The patterns of behavior in both cases are functionally indistinguishable.
Yeah it is like putting a huge red button in the middle of an otherwise empty room with a small "don't press the button" sign on the wall behind you when you enter the room.
You're presupposing fraud and illegality. That's what I'm questioning.
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.
How do you see this not being fraud? Clearly the intent was to deceive Spotify and obtain money by means of false pretenses, or do you disagree with that characterization?
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