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by bob1029 89 days ago
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.
1 comments
jonathanlydall 89 days ago
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 the defendant's behaviour was wrong and unethical and the ToS just made it easy for the plaintiffs to point out to the court that they do in fact explicitly forbid such activities, making it an open and shut case.

From headlines I've seen of around ToS enforcement over the decades, courts don't seem to just view them the same as a physically signed legal agreement and will not enforce outrageous clauses in them.

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phire 89 days ago
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.

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jongjong 89 days ago
Exactly and most of the advertisers are attention monopolies anyways and only using ads to reinforce their monopolies.
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twothreeone 89 days ago
> 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.

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