Even if he made his own legit songs, and then view botted until he was paid $10m, it would be fraud. Creating fake listeners to receive payments under false pretenses is the slam dunk fraud.
Flooding them with AI music is probably a TOS violation. But if real people were listening to the ads on those bands, the platform wouldn't give shit beyond maybe banning accounts. I kind of doubt there's going to be charges related to that part unless they just use it to say, "he spread it out to make it harder to detect, proving that he knew what he was doing was fraudulent."
Edit:
"We need to get a TON of songs fast," Smith emailed his alleged co-conspirators in late 2018, "to make this work around the anti-fraud policies these guys are all using now."
Okay. He already made that argument for them. And I guess it was royalties rather than ad payouts.
You're missing the obvious part for the AI twist.
Even if he made his own legit songs, and then view botted until he was paid $10m, it would be fraud. Creating fake listeners to receive payments under false pretenses is the slam dunk fraud.
Flooding them with AI music is probably a TOS violation. But if real people were listening to the ads on those bands, the platform wouldn't give shit beyond maybe banning accounts. I kind of doubt there's going to be charges related to that part unless they just use it to say, "he spread it out to make it harder to detect, proving that he knew what he was doing was fraudulent."
Edit:
Okay. He already made that argument for them. And I guess it was royalties rather than ad payouts.