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.

>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?

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.

It's true that the state has discretion on whether to pursue a crime, and this is apparently true for harder crimes like murder.

I guess the state prosecution just disagreed on this matter, I'm assuming that, within their specialty, they take the top N cases and dismiss the other pettier cases, and in this case this case made the cut according to the workload capacity of the fraud prosecution workforce.

In raw stolen amounts, it's not small at all, it's like 8 million dollars, which is an amount that can be argued to be worth one or two lives, it may be the cost of complex surgeries and health insurance, or the cost for good nutrition, living space, so it could be argued that this person is taking those resources away from someone else, no matter how inert or ridiculous the means by which they stole that money may be. If someone defrauds 500 million dollars by impersonating a clown, the optics of defrauding 500 million should prevail over the optics of "putting someone in jail for being a clown".

Justice is supposed to make sense for society not for the uber wealthy. No prison sentence.

Your argument: If somebody robs a bank, they did not harm society, the bank can just sue them to recover the money.

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.

> 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.

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.

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

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.

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.

Not necessarily. One can walk into a bank, slide a note and a bag, and (hopefully) walk out. No threats involved. Still a federal crime.

I feel like you are missing the rather obvious or else the note implies. Luckily the law is not so rigid as to be hamstrung by such sophistry. I didn't assault you, I merely invited your face to make an acquaintance with my fist!

The reason the note works is banks don't want to pay the cost of having their employees getting their brains blown out. Passing a note with this understanding means one knows they are making a threat.

Agreed, and if this didn’t involve the threat of violence then imprisonment wouldn’t necessarily be justified—in other words, if this were the case, it would make sense to change the law to a purely monetary penalty. But of course it is an implicit threat!

Did you miss the fact that the accounts he was streaming on were bot accounts created with stolen debit cards?

This was essentially money-laundering at scale.

Are you fine with paying $50,000 a year to separate this person from society because he cheated some company? Are we really taking corporate personhood in this direction now?

Arguably he reduced the payout of real musicians by doing this, so he did harm real people too.

Careful with that line of reasoning though because artists have been hurt by spotify more than they were hurt by this guy.

https://www.musicbusinessworldwide.com/spotify-denies-its-pl...

https://www.musicbusinessworldwide.com/remember-spotify-fake...

You don't have to go that far for bad stuff Spotifys done - at minimum they used pirated libraries back at their start, etc, and they've overall contributed to less payouts for artists. Kind of the Uber of music.

I don’t believe that people running this kind of scam are engaging in careful moral reasoning about acceptable victims. The man who did this would surely have stolen $50,000 from my grandma if he thought he saw a clever way to get away with it.

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.

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?

It's like copying a $1 bill eight million times.

I can’t really decide. Punishments for crimes need to be enough to prevent people from doing them. Guy made millions of dollars fraudulently, what’s an acceptable punishment if it’s not jail time?

Same thing with big companies. They knowingly break the law because the punishment is less than what they gain from it. There’s no incentive not to break the law at that point.

A fine of an equal amount + s&p gains on that amount over that period of time. This is not a person who has indicated they would physically be unsafe in society. Many people don’t have the opportunity to lie at that level, but would, are they dangerous and in hiding?

If they spent a good chunk of it at the time and you don't let them discharge that fine in bankruptcy, isn't that basically a sentence to a life of poverty to pay back the $X million owed? Median US income is about 90k, let's say that left him owing 4M (less than half of 8M + interest), that's 44 years to pay back 4M even if the entirety of your salary was going to it.

Is "forfeit what you've got and go to jail for 18 months" harsher than that? I'd pick the one that let me get a clean start after.

And in the case that it wasn't spent, and by fine you mean as a replacement for any forfeiture, not in addition, then sibling comment has a great point that "if you get caught, you just gotta give it back" is an incentive to commit fraud, not one against committing fraud.

So the worst case for stealing is… returning what you stole…?

I mean, returning what you stole, surrendering the gains you made from what you stole, and covering the gap of the person you stole from seems pretty reasonable? Like, they were made whole. It's a net loss to the thief.

Prison for theft is so brutally cruel. Who was really harmed by this once he paid the money back? A line item in some megacorp that was lower for awhile?

No one felt anxiety or pain, the megacorp probably barely noticed. Pay them back with interest, move on.

Obviously the calculus changes for violent thefts, or breaking into someone's home. Those cause real emotional impacts to people. Of course simply returning those items doesn't make someone whole.

Yeah I could see making him give the money back but jail seems like too much.

If the penalty for large financial crimes is simply not getting to keep the money then there is no legal deterrent to committing such crimes.

Using the fraudulently obtained debit cards should be a prison sentence. That's real money, from real people.

Don't focus on the streaming revenue angle. Focus on the fact that this was a giant money-laundering exercise, allowing him to turn stolen debit cards into real money.

This is just totally made up. The indictment says he paid for the debit cards. There's no allegation that it was stolen.

I don't know that you can make a strong case that the US over-punishes white-collar/economic crime. This isn't drug crime. The average full-of-shit-founder-or-CEO isn't getting locked up. Perhaps the US would be better off with more enforcement of large-scale economic fraud and less of petty drug possession and sales. Put some teeth into due diligence and see if peoples' investments improve.

> None of this merits a prison sentence to me.

They stope millions of dollars through fraud and deception.

That absolutely deserves a prison sentence

They actually used the term super intelligence.

I hate this timeline.

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.

Surprised it is not "Super Intelligence of America"

That's Lake Super Intelligence to you.

(Like Superior Intelligence, I believe?)

Too late to edit: Lake Superior Intelligence (duh).

There is a Gulf of Super Intelligence.

I'm just surprised he didn't rename it to American Intelligence.

I never in a thousand years would have imagined that we would have Super Intelligence thanks to Donald Trump. /s

The prosecutor is an employee of the executive branch, so use of that term is unfortunately not optional.

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.

It has immense power over federal employees and exactly zero power over anyone else.

If he has access to super intelligence, he shouldn’t need to scam those poor corporations.

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.

IANAL, but...

>a) I block or skip ads in media I consume

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

Not doing something is generally considered okay, even if it decreases someone else's revenue. eg. saying that a given product is a scam and not worth the money (assuming it's true). Same with skipping ads (eg. TiVo)

>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

Legal, because the whole point of advertising is to convince people to do something, even if it costs someone else money (eg. drugs, which might cost your insurance provider money). Where you might get into trouble is if the actions turn out to be fraud, eg. telling people to stream music, even though no one's listening to it, for the sole purpose of getting streaming minutes, or setting up a kickback scheme (might be tortious interference). Again, going back to the drug example, it's pretty intuitive. Advertising a drug? That's fine. Telling people to buy your drug, just so they can chuck it into the trash, for the sole purpose of enriching yourself? Probably illegal.

> telling people to stream music, even though no one's listening to it, for the sole purpose of getting streaming minutes

How is that fundamentally different from netflix or youtube auto-playing something after a video finishes, knowing that a large percentage of the people who started the first video won't be present or attentive to the second, in order to artificially inflate views for the content they're promoting.

1. the auto-play does eventually stop, presumably because they need to maintain some semblance of legitimacy to advertisers

2. caveat emptor. how youtube works and how ads are played is hardly secret information, so accusations that google is deceiving advertisers (not just providing a subpar product) is hard to make.

3. people have tried suing companies for this, but they were over securities fraud rather than deceiving ad buyers. No idea how successful they were though. it's worth noting that suing for securities fraud is easier because unlike with advertising, you have to declare risk factors, hence why every company's prospectus lists all potential list factors under the sun.

Intent is fundamental to all criminal cases

The intent of auto play on YouTube is not to defraud ad agencies

What is the full intention of enabling autoplay by default?

To keep the user engaged since "doing nothing" is the default action for people

I wasn’t detailed enough. What I was actually curious about is whether it mattered that bots were used.

d.1) convince humans and they use their main account

d.2) convince humans and they use and alt account

I think the resolution to my question is: it’s still fraud if humans do it, like you said. And it makes me wonder if more things should be considered fraud like paying people with free products for Amazon reviews or purchasing GH stars.

the difference is that (d) is not fraud and (e) is fraud, lol. Duh.

you seem to be thinking of the legal system like some kind of programming language / logic paradigm and it is not that and never has been

most likely ad-blocking would also be considered some sort of fraud (or rather: companies would block using their services if the ads were not seen, and then circumventing that would be regarded as fraud) except that it is not politically/socially tenable to do that at all.

It’s rhetorical. Setting aside the obvious credit card fraud because I didn’t know that was a factor when initially asking the question, no it’s not clear to me that using bot accounts to consume a digital streaming service is fraudulent or morally wrong the same way assuming a fake name to use someone else’s credit card is.

I don’t care if a service seeks civil remedy for any damages due to a breach of contract.

I also don’t fancy a future where people have to be worried about criminal penalties for spinning up a bunch of agents to automate something that enriches them.

Is buying likes and gh stars fraud? Is it okay if humans click the star button? Is it okay if a large distributed workload does it?

Anyway my actual stance is that it looks like in this case it’s not the bots that are the key focus of this matter so my earlier comment is mostly just a digression. And that I’d hope this case would be ruled similarly if for example human users were paid to stream his songs, however that would be adjudicated.

> Is buying likes and gh stars fraud?

Maybe not legally, but morally... yeah? It's definitely gross, in the sense that I would like to see it eradicated as a system.

"Cheating" systems benefits people in the short term but corrupts the, like, fabric of society in the long term ... when cheating is normalized and you have to cheat to get ahead then everything kinda vaguely sucks all the time. People often end up in a posture vis-á-vis big corporations where it feels like cheating them is morally okay because the corporations are cheating in a systemic way, or otherwise don't deserve moral recognition because they're too diffuse and machine-like... I empathize with that. But we shouldn't turn around and therefore _not_ interpret the cheating as cheating. It's still bad. But if you do it "at scale" and make a business model out of it and then get caught... well you're an idiot. I agree that it feels weird that this was a prison sentence instead of a big fine. I imagine it's a question of magnitude: it was more than skimming off a profit, it was basically at the scale of 'criminal enterprise' and we ... don't like those.

> I also don’t fancy a future where people have to be worried about criminal penalties for spinning up a bunch of agents to automate something that enriches them.

It's obviously a question of what you have the agents doing.

> And that I’d hope this case would be ruled similarly if for example human users were paid to stream his songs, however that would be adjudicated.

I agree.

The nuance is financial extraction coupled with deceit.

If your scheme doesn't extract value, nor costs anything to other parties, there is no victims, you can get away with it. Even if policies say no. The risk is termination of service.

Skipping ads is a loss of opportunity for advertisers. But they don't get extracted money. They may not like it, but they can continue to fish elsewhere and aren't being siphoned because you skip their ads.

If you spawn websites and farm fake viewers to scam ad networks, you are engaged in criminal activity. Not because you fake viewing ads. But because you extracted a profit of this activity which was extracted from another party (via deceits).

Isn't the nuance mostly or only the fraudulently obtained debit cards?

I suspect the case hinged on that, and everything else was legal, albeit part of the fraud, and was included as a complete description of the scheme.

To be fair, I'm guessing he couldn't have created the scale of fake accounts without debit card fraud, but creating multiple accounts, even if they're fake, is usually just a TOS violation, or maybe a civil matter, not criminal.

Could be a separate charge, I agree that's an even clearer cut.

But I was responding to the comment touching on more general seemingly ambiguous situations.

What makes Terms of Service / contract violations a different case than deceit for financial profit. Why is one tolerated by justice but the other condemned as criminal activity.

But you are right, debit card fraud, wire fraud and the likes are clearly defined as criminal.

> but creating multiple accounts, even if they're fake, is usually just a TOS violation, or maybe a civil matter, not criminal.

Yes, in and of itself, creating multiple accounts in violation of TOS is probably not a criminal fraud under either state or federal law.

But when you do it as the mechanism to conceal streaming manipulation in violation of the agreement that governs the terms of payment, and thereby to secure large amounts of money from the streaming service under false pretenses (and, given the structure of streaming payments, to deny payment to other song owners which they would have received without the deception) on the other hand is a different story.

Like yeah, flexing your index finger isn’t a crime, either, but if you are holding a gun with that finger on the trigger and the barrel pointed at someone's head...

The law very often is focussed more than anything about the purpose and effect of an action, and that you can ignore that and describe the action in terms that aren't criminal without considering purpose and effect really doesn't matter.

The fraudulent debit cards are definitely criminal.

Using bots to automate listening to his own songs was likely fraudulent too because he was being awarded royalties. If his songs had been monetized in some other way I'm not sure what he did would be fraud.

I don't think creating multiple accounts is, even if it's in violation of the TOS.

If that was the case, anyone who signs up for multiple accounts on a website/app to get multiple coupons/bonuses/etc... would be committing fraud.

None of this is close to firing a gun pointed at someone's head.

They very clearly made an example of him given the sentencing, but I don't think they were confident about all the charges in the indictment based on the plea agreement and the crazy high succuss rates in federal criminal cases.

> If that was the case, anyone who signs up for multiple accounts on a website/app to get multiple coupons/bonuses/etc... would be committing fraud.

That seems to me like it would be easy to prove it is fraud in a US court.

I don’t think fraud requires enrichment, does it? I know we commonly associate the two but it’s somewhat of an annoyance IMO that we only care about scheming material misrepresentation when it involve money.

Edit: interesting it does look like there must be an object of the fraud, likely to prevent the law from being used broadly to punish lying.

That sounds right. I believe it's similar to beach of contact requiring some sort of damage in addition to the breach.

Is it fraud for me to spawn a bunch of bots to listen to YOUR music? In fact, this has happened before, and people who are not involved at all get punished for the fraud that they didn’t commit. So it’s a quite tricky problem, and I agree that it just isn’t that straightforward.

This is a thing. You want to hurt someone's business? Buy a bot farm to engage in obvious click fraud on their account. Google or whoever will assume it's them doing it and shut them down, drop them or punish them otherwise. It's like a false flag operation. A superficial investigation will point to "who benefits? well it's clear who's doing this".

Easy, (e) is fraud. The rest are legal. You can choose to not do something, advertising is analogous to convincing and advertising is legal.

Collecting money from a platform by making bots play songs you created is fraud.

Making bots listen to a song without any financial incentive is not fraud.

> So how come Sam Altman & friends aren't in jail yet, but Aaron Swartz was facing life-ruining charges?

Aaron was threatening power structures, not enriching them.

>a) I block or skip ads in media I consume

Skip is fine. Blocking with third party tools is a breach of contract as a consumer, but not fraud nor a crime.

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

If they individually decide to do this, then it's 1000 times fine or 1000 instances of breach of contract. If they get together and do this collectively, or are instructed to do so by one person, it starts to encroach on civil conspiracy.

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

If you convince them to play the songs on the basis of the music, that's the very object of the contract.

If you convince them to do so on the basis of the ads, presumably you incentivize them with money if they listen to the song, then it's fraud. It's arguable of course, but if you are paying the listeners, then it obviously makes the value of the ads 0, you are knowingly selling something that has 0 value and charging a comission for that sale.

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

d) This is weird because your revenue would be 0 in this case. But arguably you would be benefitting from the service of music distribution without paying for it with the cost of serving ads along your music. It's a completely different situation than the one in the OP, it's more like piracy, less like fraud.

Again if by skip you mean a service provider interface, then that's fine, I'm assuming you mean block with ublock or some third party reverse engineered thing that's forbidden by ToS.

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

e) Of course this is fraud, I think it's obvious to you and you are just positing this as part of the obvious end of the slippery slope, so it's not worth explaining why. But just as a teaser, it involves agreeing and breaching 1000 contracts and creating 1000 fake identities, so identity fraud at least!

>(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).

Regardless of the specific case, in general there's many cases where regulation attacks only some scenarios which cause a damage, and that's fine. For example drunk driving, driving too fast, and blinking at the wrong moment all might have the same consequence, but we only regulate the first and the second.

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

Haven't read that, but this is strictly not securities fraud, just fraud.

Yes the list is rhetorical. Yes I am aware this isn’t securities fraud.

Personally, I am not sure I consider pointing a bot at a service to use it, even if it enriches you, generally to be evil or fraud. I think now more than ever the concept of a bot is almost meaningless. So my angle with the comment is to talk about the spectrum and understand why people so clearly see (e) as criminal relative to the other situations when the harm or effective outcome is the same.

We seem generally okay with deception until it is used for personal enrichment. Why is that?

>Personally, I am not sure I consider pointing a bot at a service to use it, even if it enriches you, generally to be evil or fraud. I think now more than ever the concept of a bot is almost meaningless.

I think I said this already, but in the cases of contracts and breach, it's a matter of perspective to interpret whether the gains being defrauded are gaining the consideration of the victim, or in keeping the consideration of the perpetrator, and what you are doing is taking the most charitable of the interpretations, when I think it's very obvious that of both interpretations, the most damaging should be considered.

Example, a rare baseball card is sold for 50M dollars, the 50M dollars are never wired, you would argue that it's just a stupid baseball card, when I think we should consider that 5M were stolen. The inverse scenario would be the same thing, if the 50M are wired, but the perpetrator keeps the baseball card, you would argue that it's just a baseball card, but I would say that it's fraud for 50M.

Market value is often considered, in which case it depends on third party estimations as for the true value of the thing. Which in the case of the streaming service, I don't think there's an overpricing here at all. 80M fake plays at 8M USD is like 10 cents per ad, maybe you can argue that it really was 1 cent per ad and the sentence should be lower at 800k? But it's a very weak position to argue on subjective grounds that the asset being traded is morally not something that people should be going to jail for. It would require every trial to judge not only the contract and the facts of the case but what the object of the contract was and whether it is 'serious' enough, effectively carving out some assets as 'serious' like food and oil, while others are unserious and subject to fraud, like music and software. You are effectively arguing against our trade in a way by devaluing intangible assets whose value and contracts we rely on to make a living.

No that’s not my argument actually. I don’t think theft here is justified just because it’s a streaming service or big ad or it’s just a click. There’s a real crime here.

I am uncomfortable with the idea that something that is allowed if you pay humans is also illegal if you use bots. That feels like it deserves more discussion. And it feels like while there is a clear crime here, it’s also a problem that the ad and streaming industry have a model that reduces one stream to one human. I don’t want to worry about jail time for automating tasks with bots and accidentally falling on the wrong side of some industry’s really bad/dated monetization model and having it look like fraud. That isn’t the case here, but it encroaches.

>"I am uncomfortable with the idea that something that is allowed if you pay humans is also illegal if you use bots."

To reiterate, this would also be a crime if humans were paid, although it would be easier to defend in court because it CAN be argued that the ad placement was delivered, whereas with bots it CANNOT be argued that the ads were placed.

However prosecution CAN argue if humans are paid, that this is fraud, and just replacing bots with humans in this case wouldn't materially change the legal facts, it would maybe make less economical sense, and give plausible deniability, but the objective was to defraud, to obtain money without providing the agreed upon services.

For example if the perpetrator had hired people from the philippines to make 50 accounts each, and used a proxy network to fake their locations so they effectively WATCH ads more than once and from locations that were clearly not corresponding to the intent, then those facts would bring the case closer to the the fraud that occured with bots.

It would definitely be harder to argue, but it could still be fraud, but it's a hypothetical that I'm not sure why is being brought, I feel it detracts, but definitely the fact that humans were involved hypothetically wouldn't automatically make this not fraud.

If you're not sure why I brought up the hypothetical situation and you don't want to engage with it then... don't.

I'm curious, which is why I brought it up. In my worldview humans should have a right not to be advertised to and all advertising should require consent. Even today, humans can ignore and block ads without committing ad fraud. So I don't see a difference between humans and bots consuming ad-laced content. --because no guarantees can be made as to wether an ad will be "consumed" or not, only show

Since I don't distinguish a difference, I wanted to discuss whether the case at any level hinged on the bot factor. That's all.

What I do value is the ability for institutions to control who uses their space/services. So I support regulating and punishing inappropriate use/access. In this case that would be bot usage of Spotify in ways that breaks the contract you agreed upon when you signed up to use their service.

But there's a difference between "this person committed fraud and it's criminally bad because something was fraudulently obtained from advertisers", and "this person breached their contract with spotify and possibly committed criminal computer abuse etc". So it's semantics around who is being defrauded.

"Money going to one person through deceit that would've otherwise gone to others" has a pretty material utility impact on the "others," even if they're a large aggregate or if they're corporate interests/investors who "have enough money."

I lean fairly redistributive but through consensus and governance, not through fraud.

It’s not about redistribution for me. I’m not of the mind “fuck big advertising and streaming any theft from them is justified”.

It was more about making sure we don’t punish people for something that would otherwise be legal if they paid humans to do it but instead used bots. And it doesn’t seem like that was the case here after more discussion panned out.

And also that we don’t ignore the minor but still real part of this that’s due to a really poor assumption that “one stream == one human”.

(e) is the one that’s illegal

Why do you pretend that humans are equivalent to bots?

And if you think skipping ads means the advertising agency gets screwed you are kind of showing ignorance...

I close my eyes and hit the mute button. I probably deserve the death penalty.

It's not as hard as you make it out to be.

Advertisers are fine with paying for ads even of some users turn the volume down when they come on. They are absolutely not fine with paying for ads streamed out into nothingness.

One is a problem for the industry. The other is not.

>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.

He turned to what, exactly, Donnie?

> superintelligence

> AI

Same sentence even lmao

ahhaha yes! I didn't even catch that because I was so focused on SUPER INTELLIGENCE! :@

Is every retarded influencer botting their view counts to spread antisocial content in exchange for money liable like this?

If so, I think we can save America.

> ...which were generally created using super intelligence...

> ... SMITH turned to super intelligence...

Holy shit, we've got ASI?

Where do I go to invest all the money I have in this breakthrough!

This is a government renaming directive. Similar to how DoDefense is renamed to DoWar, or Gulf of Mexico is renamed to Gulf of America.

It was made up one day and that's what govt publications must call it now.

> Where do I go to invest all the money I have in this breakthrough!

You get it.

I knew it was something dumb, I just had no idea it was dumb at that scale.

The best part about all the insistence about it being the Department of War, is that Hegseth is still the secretary of defense

The original purpose of the org was also explicitly defensive, with failing to prevent Pearl Harbor being an explicit influence for improving communication and cooperation between arms of the military through a combined leadership.

It's like recursively, fractally stupid.

Until Congress acts, it's still the DoD.

"which were generally created using super intelligence"

What the... OK, I had to check if that language was in the indictment. It's not - https://www.justice.gov/usao-sdny/media/1366241/dl uses artificial intelligence. It's the press release from the Justice Department dated 6th of October that uses "super intelligence": https://www.justice.gov/usao-sdny/pr/north-carolina-man-sent...

Amusingly (and unsurprisingly) their earlier press release dated March 19th calls it "artificial intelligence": https://www.justice.gov/usao-sdny/pr/north-carolina-man-plea...

This is the world we live in https://www.politico.com/news/2026/10/08/trump-ai-super-inte...

If I saw that and hadn't verified that was real for myself I would have thought that it was satire.

Considering the White House's market-manipulation and unprecedented insider stock trading in the last year, I would not be surprised if it's part of another corrupt scheme.

For example, pump-and-dumping .si domain names or some other asset which connects to the phrase/acronym.

I find the domain name theory funny/sad and par for the course, but it does seem like an awfully inefficient method of corruption compared to what shitler and his pals have been up to so far, no?

Like going from very successfully robbing banks to robbing convenience stores?

Seems more like a loyalty test to me.

It's absolutely that.

In his speech about it at the UN: "Let's see if I have any power. Maybe I do, and maybe I don't. We're gonna find out pretty soon".

It's a "kiss the ring" / fealty thing.

I have always been surprised by the pettiness and vulgarity of corruption. Sometimes Trump tries to steal $10,000,000,000 from the IRS, but sometimes he hawks branded Bibles for $59.99. I don't understand why someone with more money than he could spend in a dozen lifetimes regularly humiliates himself for a few grand.

The answer might be that he’s actually far less successful than he claims.

That’s the reason why he won’t let anyone see his tax returns.

He shutdown his court case against the BBC rather than open the books to the lawyers.

This is a bloke that failed at running casinos. A business where suckers just hand you their money. And he failed.

He just “ain’t right good” at business but has the ego of The Big Lebowski.

Completely agree about his business ventures and entire career. But his presidential grifts, and those of his family, do look highly effective and successful. Compared to those, a domain name pump-and-dump seems outright pathetically inefficient.

Once you have a certain amount of money it’s a sickness to just want more.

It doesn’t matter if it’s $10B or $59, more is more

Nancy Pelosi isn’t in the White House?

There's more than one criminal in government you absolute dork.

I get that politics is a team sport and all, but like the fraud and abuse Pelosi got away with is so infinitesimal compared to the absolute bald-faced grift. Did she "sell" cell-phones and then never deliver? In August alone Trump made a quarter billion dollars in securities trades.

Grow up.

Nancy Pelosi is not a criminal. It's perfectly legal for her to trade stocks. It shouldn't be, but it is.

Trump is a fraudster, rapist, thief, and traitor. He is a criminal of the basest sort.

It's a mistake to put them in the same category. It's a matter of kind, not a matter of degree.

I am not the person to tone police, especially when we're philosophically in agreement that Pelosi is not the issue at hand.

> pump-and-dumping .si domain names

That's literally what happened. Thousands of .si domains were bought up before his renaming, and then offered up for millions.

PS: His wife is from Slovenia. I'm sure that's a coincidence...

A plead to Slovenian registrars: add a condition that says the annual fee for .si domains doubles every time the owner uses the phrase "superior intelligence".

It's also just a coincidence that his kids, who have no background in technology and no knowledge of programming or cryptography have a crypto coin company that sells, nothing of value, with, basically 0 advertising, and makes billions of dollars, mostly from deals with Gulf Arab dictators, who then get favorable deals with their dad ...

I had to look it up but you are right: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Liberty_Financial

Laws really are just as effective as boo-boo band-aids aren't they?

When I clicked on this link, I had to triple check that it was the real Politico website. What interesting times we have the joy of living in…

One of the talking heads was pointing that the AI has emphasis on "artificial" - created by humans - whereis super intelligence brings up the idea of something super/above to humans, and that among others has political dimension of democracy - power of the people - vs dictatorial - power over people.

Trump decided to rebrand it as Super Intelligence since AI is so politically divisive.

I'm sure he was thinking about the divisiveness of the term 'AI' and not the millions of dollars AI companies have given him or the massive amounts of money he and his family hold in investments in AI data centers.

Greg Brockman's $25m apparently bought him the need to rename OpenAI entirely.

Yes nothing politically divisive about renaming a common term and calling people who don’t use the new term THE ENEMY.

"Can we find an even-more Matrix/Terminator-sounding name??"

I wouldn't be surprised if it was industry-pushed to try to get people used to the idea of "don't question the machine, let us replace you." Are you "super", after all?

Will AGI be Ultra?

Intel and Nvidia drove SGI out of business. Will SGI drive Intel and Nvidia out of business?

"which he used to create hundreds of thousands of AI-generated songs"

SI-generated songs. [Now trump is angry](https://www.businessinsider.com/trump-super-intelligence-reb...)

Careful, promoting thoughtcrime by malquoting Miniluv based on old documents that have not been rectified by Minitrue with the latest updates to newspeak could land you in a joycamp.

I mean paying for water, do you expect this to be drinkable or is that ad fraud? (I'm referencing a supreme court judgment here).

No says the man in washington, listening to your own song 10000 times simultaneously is "fraud"

no gods or kings, only man!

> fake email accounts

What's a "fake" email account? According to the law, that is. Does that mean that having more than one (let's say) email account might now be considered as "fake", and hence potentially illegal?