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Man pleads guilty to $8M AI-generated music scheme

therecord.media

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Re: Man pleads guilty to $8M AI-generated music scheme

#21

Post by grujicd »

This kind of fraud would be impossible if revenue from each subscriber is distributed just to the artists they listened to. Bots listening to thousands of songs would not make a difference in this model. And I would be much happier if my money went to struggling artists I like and support, rather than to the global top 10, of whom I never played a single song.

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.

Re: Man pleads guilty to $8M AI-generated music scheme

#22

Post by jonathanlydall »

lemontheme wrote: post #7

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.

Re: Man pleads guilty to $8M AI-generated music scheme

#23

Post by rahkiin »

grujicd wrote: post #21

This kind of fraud would be impossible if revenue from each subscriber is distributed just to the artists they listened to. Bots listening to thousands of songs would not make a difference in this model. And I would be much happier if my money went to struggling artists I like and support, rather than to the global top 10, of whom I never played a single song. I don't have data, but my gut feeling is that it would ma…

Which is why it is not supported by the top 5 music distribution companies which have contracts with Spotify

Re: Man pleads guilty to $8M AI-generated music scheme

#24

Post by jongjong »

phire wrote: post #16
jonathanlydall wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He essentially defrauded $8M from media streaming companies, if the ToS violation is the easiest path for the companies to have him quite rightfully convicted of what is indisputably criminal behaviour then I have zero qualms about 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 th…

The steaming services won't have lost any money on this. 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.

Exactly and most of the advertisers are attention monopolies anyways and only using ads to reinforce their monopolies.

Re: Man pleads guilty to $8M AI-generated music scheme

#25

Post by rahkiin »

phil21 wrote: post #12
burnt-resistor wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe a "fake" email address in their terms is an impossibly invalid one, unowned one that cannot be verified, or a disposable verifiable one? I'm not sure. 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.

That is all email addresses, it’s part of the spec. Aside from broken implementations of course. Periods are optional. Edit: Woops yeah, meant pluses. Dots are somewhat common as optional these days but not universal.

False, this is only with Gmail. And not even true for Gmail workspaces.

Re: Man pleads guilty to $8M AI-generated music scheme

#26

Post by twothreeone »

jonathanlydall wrote: post #13
bob1029 wrote: post #6

I'm not a fan of anything that happened here, but at the same time I have some concerns about the ability of large corporations to convert TOS violations into federal crimes. Streaming media vendors seem to get all kinds of special attention when it comes time to prosecute other humans.

He essentially defrauded $8M from media streaming companies, if the ToS violation is the easiest path for the companies to have him quite rightfully convicted of what is indisputably criminal behaviour then I have zero qualms about 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 th…

> rightfully convicted of what is indisputably criminal behaviour

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.

Re: Man pleads guilty to $8M AI-generated music scheme

#27

Post by pjc50 »

grujicd wrote: post #21

This kind of fraud would be impossible if revenue from each subscriber is distributed just to the artists they listened to. Bots listening to thousands of songs would not make a difference in this model. And I would be much happier if my money went to struggling artists I like and support, rather than to the global top 10, of whom I never played a single song. I don't have data, but my gut feeling is that it would ma…

> Bots listening to thousands of songs would not make a difference in this model.

The ad revenue from the bots would be distributed. The same problem happens on Youtube.

Re: Man pleads guilty to $8M AI-generated music scheme

#28

Post by pjc50 »

p0w3n3d wrote: post #20
huijzer wrote: post #10

So let me get this straight, Big players defraud the common people -> no prosecution Common man defrauds the big players -> prosecution

Could you provide an example of the former?

The big example is probably AI training not being counted as piracy.

Re: Man pleads guilty to $8M AI-generated music scheme

#29

Post by randyrand »

phire wrote: post #11

This conviction has nothing to do with uploading AI generated music. The illegal part was using tens-of-thousands of bot accounts to listen to them (and the ads) generating fraudulent revenue for himself. 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 dec…

In click fraud, it's the platform company defrauding the ads purchasers, by claiming the clicks are legit.

All this guy did was break TOS, and find a broken business model. No fraud. Should have found a lawyer.

Re: Man pleads guilty to $8M AI-generated music scheme

#30

Post by Imustaskforhelp »

gmerc wrote: post #14
phire wrote: post #11

This conviction has nothing to do with uploading AI generated music. The illegal part was using tens-of-thousands of bot accounts to listen to them (and the ads) generating fraudulent revenue for himself. 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 dec…

Should have used OpenClaw and they’d given him investment instead

Or perhaps OpenAI/AI startups would've even hired the guy too
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