If I understand this correctly he uploaded AI generated songs and then used bots to sign up for free accounts and stream them to generate royalties.<p>In which case the prosecutor's statement doesn't really make much sense:<p>> "Through his brazen fraud scheme, Smith stole millions in royalties that should have been paid to musicians, songwriters, and other rights holders whose songs were legitimately streamed,"<p>It wasn't other artists who lost out, it was advertisers paying for bots to listen to their ads.
It appears the prosecutor believes the defendant should have, or did, know(n) that ai generated music cannot be copyrighted. The defense has to be he tweaked the output in some creative way where creative is defined very broadly.