Lawsuit, sure, but is it actually illegal?
this post was submitted on 06 Sep 2024
1089 points (99.1% liked)
Technology
59161 readers
2206 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
People who are not part of the wealthy elite stealing profits is illegal. Doesn't matter what the method was.
load more comments
(5 replies)
Probably against the TOS, though, meaning the money paid was never owed, could get it into fraud
load more comments
(1 replies)
load more comments
(3 replies)
Its subtle, but the tone of that article's coverage actually sucks... Is futurism a piece of shit?
What a waste of my tax dollars by the DOJ to try to recover spotify´s money for a broken system that they left open and are honestly probably exploiting themselves in parallel to inflate engagement numbers and take streams away from legit artists that they have to play. Remember, they want you in their app, they don't give a shit about actual music. If you'll just listen to random boops, they save cost in the middle. Not where I want the justice systems effort to go.
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?
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.
load more comments
(3 replies)
load more comments
(5 replies)
I thought about experimenting with this (Guess it is a good thing I didn't). There are so many low effort "Lo Fi" types of streams and tracklists on Spotify and elsewhere. Who is to say my software generated garbage would be any worse than those?
There are also YouTubers who generate low effort music and ask their normal content subscribers to stream their shit on Spotify even if they aren't legitimately listening. So are those streams fraudulent as well?
It sounds like the thing he is getting popped for is the volume of automated streams.
The band Vulfpeck made a silent album named sleepify and asked their fans to stream it while not listening to other music. Made enough money to fund a tour. Spotify change their terms because of it i believe.
I think he's getting done for setting up the bots to listen to his own songs for billions of hours
Yea his mistake was pumping the number too much. If he would have kept a steady stream of income and not get greedy, they never would have noticed him.
load more comments
(1 replies)
Still better than the theory that Spotify itself is making AI jazz and putting them on their oficial playlists to not pay artists.
load more comments
(1 replies)
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
load more comments
(2 replies)
The butlerian jihad is missing the point here.
The fraud is using bots (not AI just plain python with selenium or something like that. Sorry) for making fake listeners.
AI here is just some coat to hide the fraud a little better, but nothing more.
Do they insert advertisements?
If so then the real fraud is false viewings of advertisements.
Which upsets the advertisers of course.
^
Futurama had it right, spammers are the ultimate destroyers.