The songs that the AI CEO provided to Smith originally had file names full of randomized numbers and letters such as “n_7a2b2d74-1621-4385-895d-b1e4af78d860.mp3,” the DOJ noted in its detailed press release.
When uploading them to streaming platforms, including Amazon Music, Apple Music, Spotify, and YouTube Music, the man would then change the songs’ names to words like “Zygotes,” “Zygotic,” and “Zyme Bedewing,” whatever that is.
The artist naming convention also followed a somewhat similar pattern, with names ranging from the normal-sounding “Calvin Mann” to head-scratchers like “Calorie Event,” “Calms Scorching,” and “Calypso Xored.”
To manufacture streams for these fake songs, Smith allegedly used bots that stream the songs billions of times without any real person listening. As with similar schemes, the bots’ meaningless streams were ultimately converted to royalty paychecks for the people behind them.
Maybe he broke terms of service with the streaming companies but they should be pursuing him in civil courts. This feels like abuse of the criminal justice system to retrieve money for companies that were negligent in how they were running their streaming businesses.
This guy produced music and he alsp streamed the music even if it was bots at industrial scale. He seemingly met the criteria needed to get money from the streamers. I’m not a lawyer at all but on cursory look at the definition and elements of wire fraud, I guessing this will hinge on whether this was a “material deception” - but he produced actual music and he streamed it, so is it?
Also i wonder whether it can be proven that the intent was to “defraud” rather than take advantage / game a system.
It feels like the tax payer is bearing the cost of prosecuting someone for a dispute between a person and the multi billion dollar music industry.
Also the music industry trying to paint this as theft of money from other artists is a bullshit - the streaming fees are supposedly divided out proportionately from overall streaming. He caused more streaming so the pot was bigger, and he took a proportionate share of that bigger pot. And any disproportionate sharing reflects the shitty practice’s of the streamers and the big music rights holders who are essentially monopolies squeezing out the smaller competitors from the system.
Yes but you see the companies he defrauded are big and he is small.
I don’t buy that. I think it’s fraud. Yeah, the victims of the fraud are not nice people, but the law is supposed to protect all, not just the nice people. This isn’t “gaming the system,” it’s fraud. Uploading the AI-generated songs is fine. The problem was the fake listeners. That’s where the real fraud is.
My city has a modest bus service they contract out to a private company to operate. At the front of the buses, there are scanners that count the number of people that enter the bus. These passenger counts are then baked in to what the company is paid for their services to operate the city’s bus system.
In theory, the contractor company could park a bus somewhere, set up a conga line of people, and just have thousands of phantom passengers board a bus, and then try to bill the city based on these inflated statistics. If they did that, I would absolutely hope they would be charged with fraud.
The law isn’t stupid. There’s a reason laws are enforced by judges, not algorithms. What this person did was little different than hacking a bank account and just stealing money from it. Yes, you could say, “they didn’t do anything wrong, they’re just gaming the system!” You could just as well call guessing someone’s password and stealing their money “gaming the system.” After all, is there anything on the bank’s login page that explicitly tells you not to enter someone else’s account and transfer their money to yours? No judge in a million years would buy that.
This was effectively just a hack. This guy had to create thousands of phantom people to pretend to listen to songs. He was clearly not making any good-faith attempt at making music and was just trying to exploit a weakness in their system design to extract money from them that he didn’t earn. The law thankfully doesn’t work on a standard of “well, they never told me I couldn’t.” Cases like this take into consideration the totality of the circumstances and weigh whether it is fraud or not. And this? This wasn’t some clever technicality a legit artist used to boost their earnings. This was unambiguous fraud.
I really don’t see how this is any different from pretending to be someone else to access their bank info, conning someone out of money by pretending to be a person in need, deep-faking someone’s voice to get their relatives to send money to you, or a hundred other scams involving fake identities. Yes, the victim in this case is a villain themselves, but that doesn’t make it any less a crime.
Dude, the music industry was accusing the US public of theft of music worth hundreds of trillions of $$$ back in the early 2000s. They started mailing random people with $250,000 fine PER SONG PIRATED. I had a friend with like half the Amazon music library on his home computer.
They do not fucking care and yes, have lobbied every politician and AG to be in their pockets.
Indicted on three counts involving money laundering and wire fraud
Oops. Picked on the big dogs by playing their own game.
Seriously though, probably more going on than what we read here.
Calorie event?! Why not just call it a doughnut.
“What are you in for?”
Unfortunate that he got caught. He was simply playing the same game the corps do but since he isn’t mega rich he gets punished.
So it’s OK if you are a real artist?
I think the Botting of streams to game the royalties is the bit they don’t like.
Obviously it would be a beach of t&cs
I’ve never heard of someone being arrested for breaching ToS though. They could be sued for breach of contract, but that’s it. So far the only thing I could think of is if the bots were illegally acquired by hacking devices or something. There’s nothing illegal about paying for a server and having it download free Spotify streams.
There’s nothing illegal about downloading streams, but if the purpose of your downloads is to get fraudulent royalties, then of course it’s illegal as wire fraud under 18 U.S.C. § 1343.
Still better than the theory that Spotify itself is making AI jazz and putting them on their oficial playlists to not pay artists.
The guy sounds like a great entrepreneur.
If he already had millions in the bank the lawyers would have made this go away before anyone in the public would have noticed.
And he thought he could get away with it without bribing the politicians!
110K/mo was bound to attract attention. So, purely hypothetically, uhh, what would the lowest cutoff be before eyebrows start raising?
Try 50k, with more realistic artist names, and more varied song names. Then you can bump the number up subsequent months, with the occasional drop sprinkled in for realism.
Free him
I would like that source code for… reasons.
Honestly, what did he do wrong? He made crappy cheap music and listened to it using AI and bots. listening to it must have cost him subscription money, so I guess he just listened enough to get the songs popular enough so that other would listen, and they did and everyone made money.
Yeah, it’s all cheap shit but it’s wrong when he does it but totally fine when so many other media companies do it?
but totally fine when so many other media companies do it?
Do other media companies create fake streams?
Fraud is the crime of obtaining money or property by deceiving people. He deceived streaming platforms, as he botted his songs in order to earn royalties.
The whole “AI” thing is irrelevant; it’d be the same situation if he manually produced all his music.
he botted his songs in order to earn royalties.
So if the listens were natural there would no case?
At least, not this case. AI music is its own can of worms that hasn’t been decided on in court or law yet.
But the main issue in this case is that he was scamming listens from the music services. So if he’d just let people naturally discover the AI songs somehow, and he earned money just like other Music publishers, then he would’ve been fine.
Other media companies use bots to boost streams all the time. Hence the mostly shitty popular music of today. The kind of music you make does not matter today, how you market it or ‘boost’ it does.
Yeah, it’s an exploit but it doesn’t seem illegal. It seems like the issue is with whatever service. They need to fix their contract or their software. Maybe it is in the contract or EULA that you can’t do this sort of thing already though, in which case it’s fair game.
Maybe it is in the contract or EULA that you can’t do this sort of thing already though
Then that would be a civil matter and he wouldn’t have been arrested for it.
I mean, being arrested doesn’t mean a crime was committed. It means he’s accused of a crime. I’ll be interested to see if there is actually a conviction in the end.
Exactly, I don’t think there was anything illegal here. At best it’s breach of contract with Spotify or whoever, and they could get sued. MAYBE there’s some interpretation of fraud that could apply? But it’s not like he sold anything and misrepresented it.
The bots faking real users’ streaming to gain profit is the questionable part. AI generated cheap content (created en masse for profit) will be the norm soon. If you think about it, quality content is already the exception.
Maybe a stupid question but… what exactly was illegal about this? I’m sure there were ToS or EULAs violated, but what law is he being charged on?
3rd sentence of the article:
Indicted on three counts involving money laundering and wire fraud, the Charlotte-area man faces a maximum of 20 years per charge.
If you follow the article to the press release:
SMITH, 52, of Cornelius, North Carolina, is charged with wire fraud conspiracy, which carries a maximum sentence of 20 years in prison; wire fraud, which carries a maximum sentence of 20 years in prison; and money laundering conspiracy, which carries a maximum sentence of 20 years in prison.
Those are the charges yes, but how is this any different than what all sorts of corporations do
The difference is he was a poor trying to pull himself up. Corporations are glorious entities that can do no wrong in American law.
Ah thanks. I didn’t follow to the release page and just skimmed the article, should have read closer.
It’s fraud I’m assuming. They fake “plays” for Spotify to reward by sending payment, but these plays were people that did not exist. Spotify was paying for ghosts to essentially steam music
Facebook and other social media corporations use AI bots to generate “views” to inflate their traffic numbers to entice advertisers. They also use bots to piss people off and drive “engagement.”. Which is also fraud.
Its not wrong when a corporation does it its capitalism. When an individual does it its crime.
Finally a use case for AI.
Spotify might as well be doing this themselves already to avoid having to pay all those annoying artist
Yeah, a streaming service with the hit songs like “Zyme Bedewing” from everyone’s favorite artist “Calorie Event”.
