This is just the same old view botting (aka click fraud) that has been going on for decades. The AI generated music aspect is irrelevant.
Click fraud is cut and dry wire fraud: Using electronic communications to deceptively steal money or property.
This guy is a visionary, the judges just don't get it.
All this guy did was break TOS, and find a broken business model. No fraud. Should have found a lawyer.
It’s wire fraud
He probably estimated the company would have noticed quickly if the fake listens were concentrated into a handful of real tracks. So machine generated audio was necessary to achieve the scale without detection.
You don’t have a stake in this game, I do.
Indie rights holders like me only get a slice of the revenues after Spotify pays like 75% to the RIAA firms. He gutted our pool. I’ll never see any of the pennies I’m rightfully owed even with great info from DistroKid.
I’ve come around. Copyright is dead, effectively. Just in time too. I WAS planning to sue Smart Communications for engaging in wholesale copyright infringement at scale, as they have unauthorized copies of poetry I wrote in jail - I have proof and trapped an asshole ex cop working for them into admitting they did what I suspected - but I’m moving on with life, still wounded, still sore.
Oh well, much bigger things are coming my way than worrying about money. Little people stand on piles of money to look big. They will never be able to look me eye to eye, as I’m a giraffe by comparison.
Facts.
I don't have data, but my gut feeling is that it would make a significant difference to niche artists with small but loyal listeners.
The ad revenue from the bots would be distributed. The same problem happens on Youtube.
Why don't we have a platform like that?
Does this behaviour open the door for ToS being abused? I have no legal expertise, but I would expect in cases like this that everyone would rationally come to the conclusion that the defendant's behaviour was wrong and unethical and the ToS just made it easy for the plaintiffs to point out to the court that they do in fact explicitly forbid such activities, making it an open and shut case.
From headlines I've seen of around ToS enforcement over the decades, courts don't seem to just view them the same as a physically signed legal agreement and will not enforce outrageous clauses in them.
It's the advertisers who paid for ads to get played to the bot accounts, and (depending on how the advertising deals were structured) other artists with legitimate listeners might have received smaller revenue cuts.
Consider the opposite view: if pretending to be a human is "criminal behavior" there are about 8 billion criminals walking around on this planet.. and in this case our current legal system appears to be hijacked for the protection of utterly nonsensical, hopelessly broken, ancient business models from a rent-seeking, anti-consumer, creator-exploiting, trillion-dollar corporate mafia, which would like nothing better than to track, spy, and force-feed their audience at every turn.
> At certain points, SMITH had as many as 10,000 active Bot Accounts on the Streaming Platforms
> Later, SMITH attempted to sell his fraudulent streaming scheme as a service, in which other musicians would pay him for streams he would fraudulently generate or share royalties with him in exchange for fraudulent streams of their music
> In or about 2018, SMITH began working with the Chief Executive Officer of an AI music company ("CC-3") and a music promoter ("CC-4") to create hundreds of thousands of songs using artificial intelligence that SMITH could then fraudulently stream.
What exactly is a “fake” email address here?
If I have three email addresses petethecoolone@gmail.com, joemama69@gmail.com, and michael.j.smith@gmail.com, are those “fake” as well, then? An email address doesn’t have to reflect your real name.
How about when I use iCloud Hide My Email to generate a unique email address when I create a new account somewhere? Is that a “fake” email address as well?
Or do they mean hacked email accounts that belonged to someone else? But then calling them “fake” email addresses still seems weird wording.
Fun fact: Gmail address prefixes can optionally intercalate a period between any letters. All accounts though must be remain unique after normalizing case and removing all periods.
a.bc@ = ab.c@ = a.b.c@ = abc@, but only one of these can be registered.
Periods are optional.
Edit: Woops yeah, meant pluses. Dots are somewhat common as optional these days but not universal.
yourname+amazon@gmail.com
yourname+etsy@gmail.com
yourname+itunes@gmail.com
Big players defraud the common people -> no prosecution
Common man defrauds the big players -> prosecution
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
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.
Napster Bad: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=fS6udST6lbE (a classic)
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.
Wow!