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Music Site AllofMP3 Under Investigation
Nick Irelan writes "AllofMP3.com, a Russian music site that is famous due to its low prices, has been accused of copyright infringment. Although the site said it bought licenses, some record companies are claiming that the documents it purchased aren't valid. The Moscow Police Computer Crimes Division has investigated AllofMP3 and the Moscow Prosecuter's office must decide what it will do by March 7th."
So... what's preventing them from opening AllofMp4.com days after the first site is shut down?
Is there a way how an online bussiness revenue can be *fully* tracked?
What does this mean for any of us American citizens that...ahem...may have used Allofmp3s services?
Will there be a price to pay for us? The legality is quite confusing (and yes, ignorance of the law, no matter how stupid, is no defence) and who knows what will happen to us.....
Me? I got rid of my account and waiting to see whats next......
My MythTV HowTo
Theres also an article on the german newsswite Heise : http://www.heise.de/newsticker/meldung/56678
Babelfish Translation
Spelling mistakes: My is english spoken not tongue of mother.
all the information about the customers (logs, purchase profiles, IP addresses, credit card numbers (if they keep those on file), ...) doesn't eventually end up in the hands of the Moscow police. It's not the most trustworthy police organization. </understatement>
Canadians have enjoyed free downloads because of a tax that we pay on blank media. It will be interesting to see if the customer list of allofmp3.com gets 'acquired' by any law enforcement or copyright holder in North America. If so, I wonder if any Canadian downloader would have broken any laws? I suspect not, but IANAL.
BroadbandPig
You mean... AllOfMp3's insanely cheap, Russian-hosted mp3s aren't entirely legal? I'm shocked!
I, hypothetically speaking, downloaded from AllofMP3. I didn't really care that it's illegal. The important thing to me and many others is that the music was high quality and at a much more reasonable rate than iTunes. It was a reasonable enough rate that paying for AllofMP3 was a better value for me than wasting my time sorting through Kazaa. AllofMP3 gave me good quality OGGs or LAME MP3s with fast downloads, and was probably closer to being legal than Kazaa.
Nooooooooooooo! I can't believe this, they were so good! lol... I used them for years whenever I ran out of credit on the iTunes store, cause well your 2p always went along way there! No wait, have I just incriminated myself?!?
Allofmp3 used a provision (loophole?) in the Russian copyright law that basically allows you to distribute music online if you pay the Russian music copyright clearing house a standard (and quite low) charge per song download. The clearing house then distributes the profits back to the artists. My guess is that Russian bureaucracy doesn't make it easy for Western artists to register with the clearing house or get their money from it -- not even considering the fact that any western record company would consider the clearing house charges per download laughably small.
Seriously, I've been using the site for a year or so. Their catalogue covers stuff that is not found in iTunes or other US-based media industry's services. They have even rare stuff that is not on P2P services! This little russian shop enriches culture.
Allofmp3 gives you noncompressed downloads, ogg downloads, mp3 in any bitrate you want. No DRM at all. Quick downloads. Now that's something I call customer choice and quality service. Compare that to the louse bitrate of iTunes - 128.
Why is this innovative shop against the "law?" Is this something analogous to the Sklyarov case where US media laws were extended to russia? Why the hell should we be locked into iTunes et al? Whose law was it anyway?
Is anyone even remotely surprised? They had stuff there months before it was released officially. The clues were there, people!
Maybe they could strike a deal in purchasing the Eiffel tower. The rates for scrap metal in Russia is pretty high at the moment.
Also, 1$ is a pretty nifty sum with the US inflation at the moment.
the Moscow Prosecuter's office must decide what it will do by March 7th.
Hah!
They'll pick one of the usual courses of action:
1. Do nothing.
2. Have the OMON troops make the site owners "disappear".
I was pondering opening an account there after my friend pointed me to the site. It looked like a great deal.. any format, any bit rate, wide selection of music I like (which is mostly European), and a more than reasonable prices based on bandwidth. Beats the snot out of anything else I've seen, and I'd be more than happy to pay them their prices than sift through p2p or IRC or what-have-you. Guess I should've known it was too good to be true. If they don't make it through this, I sure as hell hope another site comes along and manages to do it legally. Anyone else know of other services with similar prices and selection?
Iam gonna finish my balance quickly and go back to bittorrent
200GB/2TB $7.95 Coupon: SAVE90DOLLAR
That's where I get most my MP3s from!
On a serious note this is exactly what other online music sites should offer, like hell I'm paying $1 PER TRACK for DRM restricted files, but if they offered albums for $2-$3 each DRM free then, well, I'd probably never use filesharing again.
...since nothing is as simple as it seems in Russia (that early capitalism, you know). There are quite a number of sites which allow downloading music in Russia - another one, which I'm using, is mp3spy.ru - they have a deal with my ADSL provider, tochka.ru, which is the biggest one in Moscow. Tochka.ru is a daughter company of MGTS, Moscow telephone monopolists - that's why mp3spy.ru can be quite certain about its future. This legal move could be just an attempt to shut down a competition - all that allofmp3 needed is just a big guy behind its shoulders.
....the "The Gulag Archipelago", vols. I through III, by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn to prepare your self for what awaits you after Russian security servcices snatch you off the street and cart you off to recieve your just punishment in a secret Gulag they run in Siberia in cooperation with RIAA. The standard sentence is three years, locked in a rubber room listening to bagpipe music 24/7.
Only to idiots, are orders laws.
-- Henning von Tresckow
Interestingly the only reference to a Russian Multimedia and Internet Society, the orginizaton from which they licence the music, is on thier site or sites that have pages about thier site. Can anyone verifiy that such an orginization exists? Or if this so called loophole exists?
Its like the bogus act that warez sites cite in defense of thier activities.
Reguardless of legality in Russia, its unlikely they are permited to sell to anyone outside of russia. Though for anyone outside of russia who has purchased from this site, the enforment agencies would have to prove that you knew it was illegal and participated anyway.
In America we are imprisoned by our fear of them.
Allofmp3 is really run the way it should be. A minimal fee to cover bandwidth charges and the rest for the songs. There is no media, booklet and so on involved so the cost for those are not there.
But as long as the big labels insist on blowing millions on boosting a few artist and neglecting others it's not going to change.
The music industry is shagged.
Actually it doesn't matter if allofmp3 is illegal in Russia. The loophole in US copyright law that allows for individuals to import copies of art for personal use is a very thorough one: it doens't even matter if the material was legal in its own country. The loophole is designed to make it safe to go to Thailand, buy a music CD, and come back to the US without having to do a bunch of research to make sure you aren't breaking the law. You can import it legally even if it is an obvious bootleg.
With regard to the people wondering whether they should close their AllOfMP3.com account, go into hiding, skip the country etc, I have a question for any legal types out there:
If I buy from a real high-street shop that stocks really cheap stuff, and where I suspect, but don't know, that their goods were stolen, am I breaking the law? If they tell me the goods are cheap because of some "legal loophole", am I to blame if I buy their goods?
I suspect not, but then, as they say, IANAL...
I did find it.
I also found that its not a goverment orginization but part of a company called ZETA corporation. Which is a company of IP lawyers. They also run all the websites related to copyright in russia. roms.ru copyright.ru and several otehrs.
I dont know, that doesnt make them illegitimate, but there are questions.
In America we are imprisoned by our fear of them.
Here's a quote from another Russian, frequently renamed download site, which has a link to said organization. Rumor has it that it's just about impossible for foreigners to get money out of them.
"The Audio1 Services are licensed in accordance with the Licensing Agreement and the License # LS-3M-04-164, issued by the Russian Multimedia and Internet Society. All respective copyrights owners, including songwriters, authors, composers, artists, music publishers and recording companies are fully compensated through the Russian Multimedia and Internet Society www.roms.ru, which in accordance with the Law of the Russian Federation "On Copyright and Related Rights" is entitled to issue licenses on behalf of different copyright owners and pay them license fees."
Apparently, you just pay them a fee and you're 'licensed' to distribute anything you want.
Here's what I've never figured out: why anyone from any copyright alignment would use allofmp3.com.
If you either don't care about copyright or do not believe in the current copyright regime, your most important goal is just to download music. In that case, why would you use allofmp3.com when you could get the same music off filesharing networks for free?
If you believe that, regardless of the pleasantness of the current system, the artists (or the company the artists have chosen to represent them) should still be compensated for their work, then allofmp3.com should not be compatible with your stance. You know that they exist because of a quirk in copyright law and that they are not paying anybody anything, except perhaps some Russian licensing board.
So the way I see it, either you are wasting money by not downloading the mp3 yourself, or you are wasting money by paying allofmp3.com instead of the record company. The only audience who should be ok with this, therefore, are those for whom legality is more important than convenience or morality. Am I missing something big here?
Friends don't let friends misuse the subjunctive.
" No, the real question is: Why are you afraid? Downloading music is never illegal.
Sharing copyrighted music is copyright infringement. Downloading music is not."
THAT my friend depends on where you live.
How does the above get modded to insightful? It's a tirade, nothing more.
--
burning karma is fun
You may think me a tired, old, cynic. I'd have to disagree about the tired bit.
So as IFPI Russia's legal adviser, Vladimir Dragunov, concedes: "Because of these loopholes we don't have much chance of succeeding if we attack these companies who are using music files on the Internet under current Russian laws."
'Nothing is illegal if one hundred businessmen decide to do it. -- Andrew Young'
Thank you slashdot, that's a gorgoeus quote to put at the bottom of the page.
The law in this area is broken - copyright was created to provide an incentive to create, but the law has been twisted by the rich to rob the poor.
Until the law is fixed to protect the comman man, those of us who attempt to adhere to the law can protest the corruption by using this legal download service which does not support the rich and corrupt. Without it, there is no way to protest except to boycott or break the law.
"Those who cast the votes decide nothing; those who count the votes decide everything." (attrib. Joseph Stalin)
Yes, there is a such loophole in Russian laws.
Where is a 'broadcast license' in Russia: radio stations pay a small fee to ROMS (noncommercial organisation) every time a song is broadcasted, ROMS then distributes money to the performers. There was a court decision in Russia that each song download is equal to its broadcasting. Ringtones for cell phones may also be covered by this license.
NO ONE CARES
Someone cares. The same someone who's suing grandmas and 12 year olds. Just because any person with a decent grip on reality wouldn't care doesn't mean there aren't teams of lawyers salivating at the thought.
LilMikey.com... I'll stop doing it when you sto
My whole collection is from there....
STFU album parasite!
Even if AllOfMp3 is legal, by buying our albums offshore, we take away the jobs of hard-working Americans in the recording industry, little people who toil for as little as 70 or 100 thousand dollars a year.
It's willful moral blindness to rationalize this kind of assault on the American worker as "watching the bottom line" or "getting lean and mean" or as "fiduciary responsibility" to your shareholders -- especially when almost all of the your savings on albums (as much as $15 per CD) goes into your own pocket and the pockets of your close cronies in the form of 'executive benefits', 'bonuses' and 'golden parachutes'.
Can you imagine the hue and cry if an American company did the sort of thing you're doing by buying from AllOfMp3.com? If an American company did business overseas just because that was cheaper, and put most of the savings into top executives" salaries and benefits, while at the same time causing American jobs to be lost?
Why that sort of thing wouldn't be tolerated for an instant, not by anyone who truly loves America! Congress would pass all sorts of new "Intellectual Property" laws to put an end to it, and the FCC would mandate that all TVs sold to the American public be modified to include hardware to prevent such theft. Because our leaders truly care about the little guy!
So for shame! Stop your overseas out sourcing of your entertainment budget, and remember we don't do that sort of things to our fellow Americans!
Opinions on the Twiddler2 hand-held keyboard?
There were some interesting music industry facts in the NewYorker. The RIAA labels make money on about 300 album of to 10000 or so they put out a year. Almost all bands major label albums are money loosing investments, and the money fronted to artist to make an album is lost.(pro recording / mixing isn't cheap, although we'll see the first apple/garageband recorded album this year)
Like most "interesting facts" in the world, those are wrong. If it wasn't profitable to make an album, then those albums wouldn't be made. Simple as that. They make money on the vast majority of albums and then screw the artist by use of creative accounting practices.
My suggestion if you really want artists to make money:
1. Go find the artist's webpage and look for some kind of mailing address. Might be a fan club, might be the address of their webmaster, but it'll very likely be someone that can forward your letter to them. Email them to make sure if you're uncertain.
2. Write a letter explaining that you downloaded their music online because you felt that paying whatever the hell the price was for it when you knew they'd only see a few cents from that price was unfair. Wrap the letter around a $10 bill, or whatever you feel the album is worth.
3. Mail it.
4. The artists profit.
- Give a man a fire and he's warm for a day, but set him on fire and he's warm for the rest of his life.
Gee, maybe people don't give a shit about copyright, but don't want to get busted? This, then, is the outcome of the RIAA's barrage of suits---they've created the climate of fear they wanted and intimidated a lot of people against scoring music from p2p. But, ah, it seems that this hasn't caused people to flock to throw $10 or $20 an album at them. Rather, they went overseas to import cheap, Russian, MP3s.
The choices, then, were (prior to any lawsuit) (a) buy expensive tunes, legally, at iTMS or the like. (b) Buy cheap tunes, which may not be legal, but don't involve uploading, which means no getting gouged out of your life savings by the RIAA. (c) Download off p2p, which is cheap, but runs the risk of financial ruin if the industry makes an example of you.
Make more sense now?
--grendel drago
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
Setting aside the legal issues, I see this as the flipside of globalization. The big corps are thrilled to tout the benefits of globalization when they want to exploit third world workers for pennies on the dollar. Now they can get hit with the other side of the equation, we can choose to BUY things from other countries for less than we can here for the same reasons. Oh wait, now that it's THIER wallet being hit, it's "wrong". Poor, poor billionaires. I feel soooo bad for them.
I'm tired of the corps having thier cake and eating it too. And I consider myself libertarian, so that should tell you something. Corporations, like Copyrights, are SUPPOSED to be part of a balance of power between them and the rest of us. We are supposed to benefit as well. The balance has been lost.
"Like most "interesting facts" in the world, those are wrong. If it wasn't profitable to make an album, then those albums wouldn't be made. Simple as that. They make money on the vast majority of albums and then screw the artist by use of creative accounting practices"
No, the GP is correct. The recording industry is what's called a "speculative" business. It's a bit like playing the stock market, or investing VC money. Nine investments may lose money for you, but that tenth one just might pay for all the rest. In the recording industry, one gold or platinum record can keep a company afloat for a year.
I certainly understand that this isn't intuitive to somebody who hasn't been in a speculative business, but nonetheless, that's how it works. This is why you seldom see record companies on the Fortune 500 (except for those that are part of some conglomerate), and why you seldom see analysts issue "buy" ratings for record companies. It's also why small record labels go out of business all the time (but new ones seem to pop up at an equal rate).
Sitting in my day care, the art is decopainted.