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He indisputably defrauded $8M from these companies by "tricking" them into giving it to him.

Whereas with pirating by downloading a song, the "damage" is completely hypothetical, it's not like the downloader got actual money from doing the download and it's far from certain they would have paid the normal fee if the piracy option was not available. It's unproveable that the publisher actually lost any money from the activity.

However, hosting a website offering piracy through listing of e.g. torrents where they make significant money from ad-revenue is clearly a case of you profiting off the work of others, but it's probably still a bit grey in terms of linking the harm to the rights holder.

What's an open and closed case though is any subscription service where the website charges users in some form which grants them access to media they don't have a license to distribute and to which they don't compensate the rights holder.

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Nah, that's insane. "You ticked our endolpoint KPI shit in a way we don't like" = actual crime? Gtfo
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There's intent, deception, and damages so it's definitely fraud. This isn't a mundane matter of creatively using someone's API in a way they don't like. He came up with a scheme to extract money from them. The ToS is the contract governing payments in this case (IIUC).

It's the difference between violating a no skateboarding sign in front of a shopping mall versus a no trespassing sign at a military base. They're both "just signs", right?

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I guess forging documents and selling you a house which I don't own shouldn't be an actual crime either? The patterns of behavior in both cases are functionally indistinguishable.
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> metallica won’t be able to afford its third private jet

Napster Bad: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=fS6udST6lbE (a classic)

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Do you think fraud should be legal if it's only targeting large entities like Spotify? Would that make the world a better place?
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yes it’s fraud since you get money per listens
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