Federal prosecutors later charged him with two counts of wire fraud and eleven violations of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act,[15] carrying a cumulative maximum penalty of $1 million in fines, 35 years in prison, asset forfeiture, restitution, and supervised release.
Perhaps some exceptions for people who could not be expected to understand the law, for example an untrained retail staff being tricked in to violating laws usually only understood by management or legal teams.
Senators make millions on insider relief package info? Who cares. You challenge the powerful by revealing embarrassing secrets? Enemy of the state, you're gonna lose everything or at the very least many years of your life in legal limbo.
The power balance in many cases could be the real issue, everyday people just need to (somehow) get way more empowered.
We generally do not punish corporations harshly for criminal wrongdoing because (1) punishing the corporation mostly harms the shareholders, who aren't responsible because they only have indirect control over the corporation, and (2) the individual employees who commit crimes face criminal prosecution and punishment.
[Edit]
I regret that my comment was taken as one endorsing corporations or their shareholders profiting from crimes. That was not my intent.
But, in terms of environmental crimes as discussed in these comments, the reason corporation dump toxic waste in the river is to avoid the clean-up cost - it's an economic crime.
So in that case, it's an appropriate solution to fine a large multiple of the total clean-up cost plus damages. The point is to not make it an affordable option, no matter how rich you are.
Separately, fines which rise in proportional to wealth can work in a progressive way, e.g. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/8446545.stm
In the US, especially during this new gilded age, I'd probably change that to be a percentage of total wealth or a percentage of annual income, whichever is larger.
The prosecutors had offered Aaron 6 months, he could’ve got less.
You could walk into a liquor store - pistol whip a clerk then rob the joint and do less time. AND at least if you pistol whip a clerk you get parole. You wont get federal parole if you try to guess a computer password [1].
https://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/is-federal-parole-sy...
"The charges against Ticketmaster come 26 months after Zeeshan Zaidi, the former head of Ticketmaster’s artist services division, pled guilty in a related case to conspiring to hack the rival company and engage in wired fraud."
[1] 2 years of net profits? 50% of gross revenue? IDK. It has to be meaningful amount to truly deter criminal acts.
I am not saying that our system doesn't work. It just feels that there is so much left to do.
Live Nation is worth $16 Billion. This is like a person with a $100k net worth having to pay a $62 fine, basically an expensive parking ticket.
They might as well tell them to write "I will not hack my competitors" on the blackboard 100 times.
LYV had $2.6b on hand last quarter.
There's prior art, this is what the IRS makes folks who are attempting to renounce their citizenship (or give up a green card held for over 8 years) do for illiquid assets when paying the expatriation tax.
I'm not sure I follow the logic of looking at the net worth of a conglomerate when assessing a fine. If someone parks the corporate car in a no-parking zone, or spits out chewing gum on the sidewalk, you're not going to fine them x% of net worth. At least in terms of consequences for the corporation, you'd they would be (punitively) proportional to the economic impact of the criminal activity.
What was the impact of this conduct? It's not mentioned in the story. If they paid a $10 million fine on criminal activity that gleaned them a $1 billion advantage, then yeah this is a slap on the wrist. If it's a $10 million fine on something that gave them a $10 advantage, it's arguably overly punitive.
> They might as well tell them to write "I will not hack my competitors" on the blackboard 100 times.
Not even. I bet a person with a $100k net worth will probably rather pay $62 than have to do the blackboard punishment.
If Massively-Evil-Plan™ increases profits from 10% to 20% then even after a 4% fine on revenue, real profits are still 15%. A company only motivated by profits and fines (which seems like a reasonable assumption if we're using laws like GDPR to deter "heinous shit") would be crazy not to continue with MEP™.
It's really the same kind of calculation as with fixed fines or fines based on damage done. When profitable, they're still written off as the cost of doing business. The only material difference would be that a fixed fine effectively allows large companies to do "heinous shit" while imposing fines so large that a small company can't compete, whereas with a revenue calculation you instead just need to make sure that your "heinous shit" is scalable. That doesn't apply in practice though, since GDPR has an alternative €20M fine which would go into effect, so in reality GDPR just says that to do "heinous shit" you need to be able to do a lot of it scalably and profitably.
The natural direction one might take this is just to say that the fines must not be big enough, but until you approach 100% of revenue the potential always exists for a new form of profitable "heinous shit" to crop up. If fines of that scale are on the table then that brings us to the other side of the coin: A single violation of any anti-MEP™ law will nearly certainly end the business. If a violation of an anti-MEP™ law necessarily meant that a corporation was doing "heinous shit" then that could plausibly be acceptable (definitely up for debate), but merely not appointing a data protection officer in the EU violates GDPR and potentially subjects a business to a 2% of revenue fine. The law will not perfectly align with what a reasonable person would consider "heinous shit," and too severe of a penalty in such situations seems prone to abuse.
A person doing the exact same thing would be heading to prison.
Seems like the same crime has a very different outcome when a corporation commits it.
You can read the criminal complaint: https://www.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.nyed.439451...
Aside from the usual explanation (white collar crime), any idea why someone can be found guilty and then still not given a sentence for more than a year. AFAICT he isn't even incarcerated at the moment.
Why can't we have our own personal corporations, which can stiff our creditors, cheat customers, etc etc with impunity? Surely all the social benefits of allowing this behavior from groups would only multiply if these liberties extended to individuals as well.
>Factors that a court may consider when determining whether or not to pierce the corporate veil include the following
>[...]
>Was the corporation being used as a "façade" for dominant shareholder(s) personal dealings; alter ego theory;
With fully automated driving the number of crashes (and therefore injuries & deaths) will go down -dramatically-. So you can argue all you want about the ethics & morality of the ~100 deaths/year or so from automated car crashes. But that's far preferable to the current situation. Even if we still have 10-20k deaths/year from automated driving systems, that's still a large improvement.
This argument about the ethics of contrived car accident scenarios totally misses the boat. In my opinion the only ethical argument is to move over to fully automated driving systems as soon as -safely- possible.
If only the people who get outraged about self-driving cars were as outraged by this fact and applied pressure to improve street design and speed limit enforcement.
...except the corporation being fined and/or sued in civil court, along with the executives/engineers responsible facing criminal charges.
Of course it does. There's a separate justice system for the rich and powerful.
"Ticketmaster" didn't do anything. Ticketmaster is a company which cannot make decisions or take actions.
- An employee at Ticketmaster stole a password (and financial documents)
- Multiple other Ticketmaster employees abused that stolen information to actively attack a competitor.
- Ticketmaster management was aware of this and rewarded that employee with a promotion and additional responsibilities.
Both the thief and the managers who rewarded the the thief should be going to jail. Instead the company is paying a small fine. I guess at least someone is going to prison, but I doubt all of the parties who were aware are. As usual, the executives in charge walk away.
Hopefully there is a class action lawsuit by the shareholders/ owners of this company against Ticketmaster.
IMO both the individuals and the corporation should be held responsible.
Corporations can't act, people inside the corporations act. If laws get broken, the individuals who made that choice should pay the price. This wasn't a defense of the company, I'm fine with the company getting fined here, so long as the people who did this get penalized as well.
So long as we let companies be a sort of shelter for the people inside the company, this kind of activity will continue.
As usual, the DoJ has little appetite to prosecute non-weak people.
It is the most maddeningly predictable outcome of every DoJ action against a corporation (w/ well funded lobbyists). We can thank every administration ever for this.
Ticketmaster did do something. They clearly broke the law. So did the individuals. All should be severely punished this is egregious behavior.
At some point the employees involved were fired. So there was some short term reward, and long term... I don't know.
Also, the article says that Zeeshan Zaidi, plead guilty to 26 months ago. So obviously this is the last in a series of consequences.
What the hell is the app installed on my phone, then?
The bit that Ticketmaster/LN 'acquired' in 2018 was, by then, just a vehicle for the lawsuit related to this hack/other anti-competitive/monopolistic behaviour.
He appears to be awaiting sentencing.
For this to be proportional, ticketmaster should lose either 2 full years worth of income, or 5% of all profits in perpetuity. The amount they were fined for actually doing the crime was a rounding error by comparison.
I think 15 conspiracy charges are appropriate, bare minimum.
Corporate crime needs to be prosecuted like personal crime, with 20-year-jail sentences in a jail full of Crips and Bloods and Aryan Brotherhood. Your Harvard MBA dude truly knows that he doesn't have a snowball's chance in hell of surviving a place like that.
It's up to the judge whether he sees the inside of a jail cell.
You mean the way Amazon does it every day to successful, independent small sellers, copies their products and bans them from Amazon without providing a reason why? The way Google removed Tutanota from search results? Microsoft spread FUD about open-source? Or like Oracle acquired MySQL?
How is this not a criminal conspiracy engaged in by the CEO (either before or after the fact) resulting in Jail time for the CEO?
Is it just because "with a computer" that the CEO isn't facing charges? What crimes committed and prior or subsequent knowledge of and then profit from those crimes would qualify in the CEO being charged with being involved in a criminal conspiracy? Does it have to be something that reads dramatically in a newspaper like armed robbery or assult or murder? Do the victims of the crime have to be elderly? Or are those crimes also fine as long as your title is CEO rather than "Don"?
Is this fixable?
Are you commenting on the disparate sentencing for the company versus an individual?
It is a deferred prosecution agreement, which is definitely an aspect of corporatism: that is the pre -eminent rights of corporations over natural people.
However there was a criminal conviction of a natural person as well. The DPP was the criminal conviction of the corporation that benefited from the underlying crime.
DPPs exist to avoid collateral damage to innocents dependent on the corporation, whilst still criminally convicting the corporation itself. It’s a balancing game.
With it a bit nuanced I am curious to understand better what you meant by your comment.
Has the CEO been charged? How bad does the crime have to be before the CEO being involved in it before it happened, or becoming aware and profiting from it after without informing the police before the CEO is themselves charged for the CEO's criminal behaviour in engaging in a criminal conspiracy with respect to that crime.
I'm hoping if the crime was murder, conspiring by the CEO would result in charges. Yes?
What level of crime is sheielded? Should any crime be sheielded like this?
The charges against Ticketmaster come 26 months after Zeeshan Zaidi, the former head of Ticketmaster’s artist services division, pled guilty in a related case to conspiring to hack the rival company and engage in wired fraud. According to prosecutors, the former rival employee emailed the login credentials to Zaidi and another Ticketmaster employee.
In case anyone was wondering, who, specifically went out of business:
> Court documents didn’t identify the rival company, but Variety reported it was Songkick, which in 2017 filed a lawsuit accusing Ticketmaster of hacking its database. A few months later, Songkick went out of business.
That would sting about as much as me getting a parking ticket. So somehow hacking a competitor is on the same level as parking on a wrong side of the street.
> Third-quarter revenue was about $154 million in 2020 compared to over $3 billion in 2019, with the company — which operates both Live Nation and Ticketmaster — reporting a $173 million loss for its concert business and a $142 million loss for ticketing.
https://www.rollingstone.com/pro/news/live-nation-revenue-dr...
I mean, I guess maybe there could be and we don't know.
