US man given prison sentence for bot-farming music streams

He is guilty of creating a bot farm to stream his music, to increase his user count to earn royalties, which is fraud.

Eh.

> Is it a crime to publish an AI generated song?

It's not. And a lot of this fraud was done with non-AI songs. But it helps show his attitude.

> It seems that what he is guilty of is to generate some fake users pretending to listen to his songs, is that right? I can see how it is fraud, but how is it different from all the dark patterns used by newspapers to generate more page prints (like auto-refreshing pages)?

Does that get them more money just for showing the ads? Usually the number of page views is up to you. If you find a way to make oodles of money off a mechanism like that, it very well might be criminal fraud!

They were just simple short instrument loops (a basic drum machine beat, a short bass line, a few piano notes) repeating indefinitely, white noise, drones, and such.

The fraud is only possible because of the way the streaming revenue sharing is split. The way royalties are paid by streamers can basically be summed up by the equation: (total subscription revenue * some agreed to percentage) / total hours streamed by all subscribers for all songs * total hours your songs were streamed.

So let’s say total revenue is $1 million and the artists get 10% of revenue, and there is a total of 1 million hours of streamed music by those subscribers. This means that artists will earn 10 cents for every hour their song is streamed.

On the surface, this seems like a pretty fair way to distribute revenue.

However, what this means that a user who streams more will generate more revenue for artists than a user who streams less, even though the two users pay the same price for their subscription.

For example, imagine a streamer only has two customers, Bob and Alice. If Bob listens to 99 hours of Artist A, while Alice listens to 1 hour of Artist B, then Artist A will get 99 times as much revenue as Artist B, even though they both have one fan and they both pay the same.

So you can see how this could be abused; if I sign up for an account and have it stream my music 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, I am going to have more hours streamed than 20 average users, meaning I end up earning more revenue in royalties than I paid for my subscription (since even though I only get 10% of the revenue, my 20x the average subscriber volume means I end up with 2x my subscription cost in revenue)

If I do this thousands of times, I can make serious money… like this guy did, apparently.

There is a simple fix for this, and I think it actually makes it more fair for artists; do the revenue split on a per user basis. In other words, if 10% of revenue goes to the artists, you take 10% of an individual subscribers subscription price, and divide it up amongst all the artists that user streamed based on time streamed. For example, if my sub costs $10, $1 goes to the artists I stream. If I only listen to one artist, they get the $1 no matter how many hours I stream.

This ensures that a single user can never direct more than their own 10% to an artist, and you would have no incentive to stream your own music.

This seems fair and reasonable to me.

   > I can see how it is fraud, but how is it different from all the dark patterns used by newspapers to generate more page prints (like auto-refreshing pages)?

So to answer your question, it’s not a crime to publish an AI-generated song, but it is a crime to commit fraud.

> The US Justice Department gives the example that the entire catalogue of Taylor Swift received 9.3 million streams on YouTube Music from family plan streams in April 2023., In the same month, Smith’s bot accounts used family plans to fraudulently stream his AI-generated music 80.9 million times.

Basically, the guy got very greedy and generated roughly 10x more streams than a widely popular artist.

It makes me wonder that, if he did significantly less streams, would he have been caught? Are there other fake streams flying under the radar?

Who do you think receives the ad money paid by advertisers?

With fake bot streams it is pretty clearly stealing from the other artists who would otherwise get a greater share of the royalties pool. I see your point, but I really have to stretch my imagination to call them morally equivalent.

In terms of choosing the con, the guy calls himself a musician so he probably just fell into it. I bet there was a slippery slope effect: use bots "just a bit" at first to juice the algorithm for his own real songs. Then dabbling with AI generation to tweak the algorithm more, oh the royalty payments feel good, maybe a few more bots...

Automating buying up GPUs when there is a huge demand or shortage* and no risk simple fraud free money from Spotify don't seem any similar to me morally or legally.

* unless there is a special offer by the shop that only allows a limited number of purchases by person. Breaking that would be much closer

From the indictment:

>SMITH’s streaming fraud lasted from 2017 to 2024 and he executed it in three steps. First, SMITH created thousands of fraudulent accounts on the Streaming Platforms (the “Bot Accounts”) that he could use to stream songs. Second, he used software to cause the Bot Accounts to continuously stream purported songs that he owned, which were generally created using super intelligence. Third, Smith collected royalties based on the fraudulent streams he orchestrated his own Bot Accounts to conduct.

>SMITH spread his automated streams across thousands of songs to avoid anomalous streaming as to any single song, which would likely cause the Streaming Platforms to discover his scheme. At times SMITH was using as many as 10,000 Bot Accounts at once to fraudulently stream music, and he used fake email accounts and fraudulently-obtained debit cards to create the Bot Accounts. As SMITH explained it in an email, he needed “a TON of songs fast” in order to circumvent the “anti fraud policies” of the Streaming Platforms. 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.

So this isn't even "haha wouldn't it be funny if we make a 10 hour song that's just silence and then convince people to play it while they're sleeping", which would at least be vaguely legal. This is far closer to ad fraud.

Fraud. https://xkcd.com/1494/

However, using bots to collect royalties on the songs generated definitely fits within the definition of wire fraud as he was using electronic communications (i.e., the internet), to carry out a scheme to defraud streaming services of money.

Are any major corporations doing something similar to this, play-botting to get other people's royalty money?

Yes, exactly. Traditionally, fraud consists of lying to obtain something you wouldn't have gotten otherwise. This seems sensible, right?

But corpos have figured out how to abuse this - create a long list of business-method-desires in their "terms of service" (aka the legalese diarrhea that nobody reads). The corpos then take the position that merely by using their service as presented, users have take on responsibility for representing that they will abide by the listed whims. When it turns out that users' interests differ from the corpo's whims, and a user does something they majorly don't like, they cry fraud.

In the past, this was limited by the facts that 1. legalese diarrhea wasn't really involved in day to day transactions (we relied on legislative law made by public bodies rather than private law unilaterally promulgated by corpos) and 2. when you bought something, the seller's control over it simply ended. Both of those assumptions have been blown away by pervasive communications, and we really need some reform here.

No, far from it. A free market doesn’t have regulations, subsidies, tax incentives, bailouts, etc.

> SMITH pled guilty to one count of conspiracy to commit wire fraud

the department of justice made a sophisticated music-themed plot around it because the only crime they had was too dumb

You don't even need to be a major corporation to get away with it. You can be an individual if you have the right connections.

I believe what this guy did with the music streaming was wrong. But I also think whatever punishment he gets should be shared by someone who, say, lies about their 500 active user worthless company to unload it for tens of millions of dollars.

But one of these people is going to jail for a year and a half and one is preparing to launch a trillion+ dollar IPO.

"“Michael Smith exploited super intelligence technology to generate a fraud,” said US Attorney Jamie McDonald. “By flooding music streaming platforms with automated bots in the place of consumers, and fake songs in the place of creativity, Smith robbed millions in royalty payments from genuine artists and their fans."

This state attorney does not seem to be the sharpest tool in the box or I don't get it.

1. I don't see any possible way how he could have stolen from the fans of the artists.

2. If he stole from the artists, then this must be a fixed amount of money in the pot and the slice of the piece of the cake gets smaller, if more people withdraw. There might be such an arrangement between artists and the streaming provider but I don't know details.

If you and I have a contract that I’ll pay you for unique shoppers referred to my store and you just go in yourself to trigger the door counter 10,000 times wearing different disguises, it’s pretty clear that you have defrauded me.

If you ignore the keyword optimizing buzz-catcher press release, thats the crime right there. He used stolen debit card numbers to sign up accounts.

If lying to induce or fulfil a contract were not a crime, someone could sell you a car telling you it has 0km, but it's actually 300km. Or they could sell you a hamburger telling you its made of meat, and it's actually made of soy. Etc..

Selling a song with 100M listens is a lie if you faked those 100M listens, it's not very different from stealing (but it is different)

Fraud

That is what I see with this case. Aside from the debit card thing I am not certain any laws were broken. If making "bots and socks" to manipulate for profit is illegal there is a lot more areas that I would love to see them gone from.

The law doesn't work that way. So much of the law comes down to holistic and subjective tests. It looks at the totality of the evidence. Those tests typically also contain questions that are also tests.

Let me give you an example: the FBI gets access to a site hosting CSAM and, in doing so, they get IP logs. Many of those logs point to US IP addresses. From this they make arrests and prosecutions.

The typical engineer defense is "you can't prove that use of my IP was me", like you could've been hacked. While that's technically true, the law doesn't work on absolute certainty. Investigators and prosecutors will do things like figure out if you were home at the time, if there's any corroborating evidence on any of your devices and so on.

So back to streaming, you look at the totality of the accused's actions. Did he get mass copies of copyrighted music? As BS as IP is (IMHO), stealing it is still a crime. Using services within their ToS isn't a defense. And the fact that you committed a crime probably means you violated the ToS anyway. Dig in there and you'll probably find stuff about not doing things that aren't illegal.

If the debit card fraud wasn't present, and it was instead a group of individuals doing this, I'm not sure if it would end up in criminal court. It could still end up in civil court.

In Kelly vs US [1] a couple of politicians were convicted of wire fraud for closing certain lanes to create a traffic jam for political benefit. It was overturned by the Supreme Court but that gets into interpretive arguments of what the statute means when it says "OR". The law isn't like code. Anyhow, yeah the wire fraud statute really needs to be rewritten or broken down into more appropriate and targeted statutes. But that will never happen because it's a superweapon in its current state.

[1] - https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/1343

[2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kelly_v._United_States

He’s indicted for mass streaming his own songs to pump up the play count. It’s outright fraud.

Go big or go to jail

was it ever othrewise?

When does he stop qualifying as the poor?

They basically put all the revenue into one pot, then divide it by the songs play count.

Which means that account that streams 10 000 plays, have more "voting power" on the revenue that one that just listens "normally"

Try here: https://www.p3tips.com/Drill.aspx

This U.S. Attorney is obviously frightened he'll be taken to re-education should he use banned terminology.