alt Hacker NewsNo? A bank is a regulated entity in the public interest.
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.
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> Juicing some streaming numbers hurt who?
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.
>No? A bank is a regulated entity in the public interest.
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?
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> Juicing some streaming numbers hurt who? Spotify's margin?
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.