US man given prison sentence for bot-farming music streams(thequietus.com) |
US man given prison sentence for bot-farming music streams(thequietus.com) |
I need this guy’s lawyer
> "Michael Smith exploited super intelligence technology to generate a fraud,” said U.S. 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 Office is committed to ensuring the integrity of all markets, and protecting the public from those who use super intelligence for fraud."
Wow, uh, he had a time machine?
> Smith’s streaming fraud lasted from 2017 to 2024
People here in HN seem to believe that royalty collecting companies are some sort of charitable organizations for the benefit of the artists. But their conduct and practices range from questionable [1] to outright fraudulent [2]. And now they manage to fly below the radar, because everyone (artists included) is busy bashing Spotify. These companies would sue Spotify out of existence had they offered the option to directly pay the artists instead of going through them.
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/japan/comments/1302np/jasrac_this_i...
[2] https://torrentfreak.com/huge-scandal-engulfs-greek-anti-pir...
Isn't that just "marketing"?
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
He turned to what, exactly, Donnie?
I hate this timeline.
If so, I think we can save America.
> ... 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!
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.
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.
Are any major corporations doing something similar to this, play-botting to get other people's royalty money?
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.
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.
"“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.
“Royalty payments are made proportionately to musicians and songwriters from a pool of funds. As a result, streaming fraud diverts funds from musicians and songwriters whose songs were legitimately streamed by real consumers to those who use automation to falsely create the appearance of legitimate streaming.”
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.
No, far from it. A free market doesn’t have regulations, subsidies, tax incentives, bailouts, etc.
Fraud
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 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. https://xkcd.com/1494/
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.
> 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
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.
Super intelligence. Aha. :)
This U.S. Attorney is obviously frightened he'll be taken to re-education should he use banned terminology.
Our legal system has been turned into a tool to punish the poor and enrich the wealthy.
When does he stop qualifying as the poor?
was it ever othrewise?
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...
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)?
He certainly didn’t defraud artists or their fans. This is false framing. He defrauded the streaming platform, which I’m sure the jury would be far less empathetic towards.
So the agencies are forced to pretend every ridiculous thing their king says is a great idea.
I gather these are cards that he opened and funded, not stolen cards. I'm surprised at this scale it wasn't detected much sooner.
These accounts had to be listening a lot in order to generate more royalties than the subscription fees. e.g. Spotify family is $21.99/mo for six accounts. That's $440K annually for 10,000 accounts. Sheesh.
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"
> he used fake email accounts and fraudulently-obtained debit cards to create the Bot Accounts.
I think this is likely where the 18-month sentence comes from.
Bot armies ( trained to be inefficient to avoid detection ) streaming music over the wire en masse seems pretty wasteful. I wonder how many others are doing it?
what always fascinates me about crime like this is, if this guy hadn't tried to make 8 million dollars with 10k bot accounts and boosted himself straight to the top, he could have easily made a few thousand per month. How are people clever enough to set this scheme up to begin with but don't consider that you maybe shouldn't try to alert the entire fraud department
Try here: https://www.p3tips.com/Drill.aspx
Instead, it is all dumped in one big pool and distributed by total listens.
Which means, if you listen to more songs, you have more "voting power" on who gets the money. Absolutely asinine system.
He is guilty of creating a bot farm to stream his music, to increase his user count to earn royalties, which is fraud.
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.
1. There is no way he the the only one or first one. Chances are that more than likely he was subscribing to some third party services which were offering this feature.
2. He probably took it too far to get noticed and get in limelight
There are plenty of ways to violate a TOS non-remuneratively or without using deception ("deception" is an element of the crime of fraud and has to be proved up in court; it's not simply what the TOS says it is). Those are civil matters, not crime.
The template you want to be working from: lying for money is 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.
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!
Fraud in larger scale and using other people's computers.
Was it ever prosecuted with the same vigour?
It's a corporation so I'm gonna bet no.
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.
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.
SI-generated songs. [Now trump is angry](https://www.businessinsider.com/trump-super-intelligence-reb...)
> ‘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.
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.
>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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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".
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?
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?