The global record industry has welcomed the latest court order in Brazil targeting a platform that offers stream manipulation services, allowing users to artificially boost streams on Spotify, SoundCloud and YouTube Music.
A court in São Paulo has told the company behind a platform known as Boom de Seguidores to cease providing services that distort digital markets and deceive consumers, while also issuing web-blocks against the company’s domains.
It’s the latest judgement secured by Operation Authêntica, which is led by CyberGaeco, a cybercrime unit within the prosecutor’s office of Sao Paulo.
Welcoming the ruling, Paulo Rosa from Brazilian record industry trade group Pro-Música Brasil explains that the court concluded that the operators of Boom de Seguidores were “offering misleading advertising and committing fraud”.
Melissa Morgia, Global Chief Content Protection Officer at IFPI, has also welcomed the judgement. She says that courts in Brazil have “consistently confirmed that services that enable streaming fraud mislead consumers and are unlawful”.
This “illicit business model”, she adds, “commercialises fraud and, in the music context, ultimately diverts royalties from legitimate creators. IFPI would like to thank the authorities for their ongoing efforts and will continue to support actions that create serious consequences for those involved”.
Stream manipulation and streaming fraud is a multi-layered problem which requires multi-layered solutions, though going after the companies that overtly sell stream manipulation services is an important part of that work. Both industry groups and law enforcement agencies in multiple countries have sought to crackdown on those companies, with CyberGaeco in Brazil being particularly proactive in this domain.
An official statement says that CyberGaeco’s Operation Authêntica “aims to combat the commercialisation of fraudulent engagement services, including services that artificially inflate plays on music streaming platforms”, and that the ruling against Boom de Seguidores is the third such positive judgement secured by the operation, “following positive rulings against Seguidores and Turbine Digital”.
‘ The preceding article may include information circulated by third parties ’
‘ Some details of this article were extracted from the following source completemusicupdate.com ’
