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Comment by dcow

It’s rhetorical. Setting aside the obvious credit card fraud because I didn’t know that was a factor when initially asking the question, no it’s not clear to me that using bot accounts to consume a digital streaming service is fraudulent or morally wrong the same way assuming a fake name to use someone else’s credit card is.

I don’t care if a service seeks civil remedy for any damages due to a breach of contract.

I also don’t fancy a future where people have to be worried about criminal penalties for spinning up a bunch of agents to automate something that enriches them.

Is buying likes and gh stars fraud? Is it okay if humans click the star button? Is it okay if a large distributed workload does it?

Anyway my actual stance is that it looks like in this case it’s not the bots that are the key focus of this matter so my earlier comment is mostly just a digression. And that I’d hope this case would be ruled similarly if for example human users were paid to stream his songs, however that would be adjudicated.

parent dcow 23 days ago

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