American producer Michael Smith has asked a court to impose no prison sentence after pleading guilty in March to one count of conspiracy to commit wire fraud in a case involving more than $10m in royalties from AI-generated music.
Smith agreed to forfeit more than $8m of those royalties as part of his plea and has been awaiting a sentencing decision. The charge carries a maximum sentence of five years in prison.
In a new filing, his legal team argued that he should not be jailed even though, as the filing states, “he knew that he was cheating the system.”
The attorneys said Smith’s streaming fraud did not cause widespread harm to songwriters and artists, stating: “The effect each individual stream of one artist’s song has on every other artist’s share of total streams is not akin to a drop in a proverbial bucket; it is a drop in an ocean.”
Smith’s lawyers also claimed that bot-driven fraud is “indisputably rampant… including by big labels and publishers.”
