There are lots of "not clearly legal" things that turn into big business.
- YouTube had dubious legality when it started and definitely benefited from lax copyright enforcement initially
- PayPal didn't have all the licenses it needed to transfer money between states
- Spotify used pirated music when it started
- Uber and Lyft broke rules around taxis
- Square captured magstripe data over an analog port, in violation of every credit card rule (Jack Dorsey's "break the rules" mantra). He tells each of his employees this story when he onboards them.
- Companies scraping data to train models
- ElevenLabs growing big off of deepfake celebrity audio
...
A lot of new markets start out by totally and completely breaking the norms.
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There was no value creation involved here. It was a fraud, plain and simple. If you did this manually, it would still ve a fraud.
There are lots of "not clearly legal" things that turn into big business.
- YouTube had dubious legality when it started and definitely benefited from lax copyright enforcement initially
- PayPal didn't have all the licenses it needed to transfer money between states
- Spotify used pirated music when it started
- Uber and Lyft broke rules around taxis
- Square captured magstripe data over an analog port, in violation of every credit card rule (Jack Dorsey's "break the rules" mantra). He tells each of his employees this story when he onboards them.
- Companies scraping data to train models
- ElevenLabs growing big off of deepfake celebrity audio
...
A lot of new markets start out by totally and completely breaking the norms.
Yes I agree there is a lot of crime and fraud that gets ignored because rich do it. That is the whole point of the complaint.