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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."
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.
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.
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?
In Soviet Russia... they can send you to Siberia - it's rather hard to get a good broadband connection there...
Phil
Is anyone even remotely surprised? They had stuff there months before it was released officially. The clues were there, people!
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?
...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
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.
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.
Be careful with your words.
You don't live in Russia (I do). And from my point of view its America who is becoming a fascist country.
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.
This is why it's a good idea to only use stolen credit cards online.
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.
First of all, Russia was never a fascist country. It was totalitarian, but never a fascist.
:)
Current situation is quite an interesting one. Putin has done more liberal reforms in economic, than Eltsin did during his second term, but political situation is getting more and more like in USSR.
It's all very complex for me to explain it in a short message
---
"I did nothing. I did absolutely nothing and it was everything that I thought it could be."
'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
Most Americans are no longer able to distinguish a Presidential campaign from the latest episode of American Idol. Watch TV and vote for who you like: that's all there is to it.
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?
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.