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AllofMP3 Voucher Resellers Quit After Police Raid
Broohaha writes "Europeans who resell AllofMP3.com vouchers are quitting the business after a UK raid against one prominent reseller there. An Ars Technica article talks to several of them about their situations. 'Until a few days ago, I had never heard of the IFPI [the international music trade group],' said one reseller. 'But yes, I am concerned about them now. Although my attorney assures me that reselling gift certificates bought from AllOfMP3.com isn't breaking any laws, it isn't worth the possibility of engagement with their legal machine.' The music industry seems determined to choke off AllofMP3's funding, no matter how small the source."
I guess the RIAA wins... I'll just have to go back to BitTorrent...
If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be.-TJ
Okay, first, IANAL. But I know that in the US, harassment of a company's business partners can be considered actionable under RICO. Anyone know if AllOfMP3 may be able to bring a suit against IFPI?
These guys are doing nothing illegal, and yet the music industry is still using their legal machinery to harass them. Apparently the music industry has no respect for law abiding citizens rights and privileges under the law. If the music industry doesn't respect the law, then why should the 'pirates'?
I would love to see how the astroturfers here spin this, go on.
At this point doing things the RIAA doesn't like is basically necessary civil disobedience.
"Thanks for all the money you paid to us. We've used it to buy off ISO among other things" -Microsoft
since when has anybody in the UK called a solicitor or lawyer/barrister an "attorney"
that word is used almost exclusivly by Americans, was this reseller an American in the UK or was the "quote" edited for a US audience
smells like bullshit here in London
the selling of gift certificates isnt illegal but the use of them is frowned upon and thus anyone selling them is brought into the whole mess. The RIAA and company represent a group of interests that foolishly cut off any legal way to try out music or be locked in with DRM. that is why they lose cash, you cant screw people like that and expect to make MORE cash forever. if they were smart they would realize that they'd make more money by giving people the legal freedom to listen to music more freely than current and piracy would probably decrease as well- why pirate what is easy and cheap to begin with?
Sigs are too short to say anything truly profound so read the above post instead.
To me, "The music industry" seems to have become the bane of civil and modern life. As if there exist no problems in the world, no wars, no poverty, no economic issues but fucking more-cash problems of the "music industry". makes one start to treat individuals involved in this "music industry" like lowlifes in everyday life.
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If the State EXECUTEs, why can't I execute?? God I love sound logic !!
You know and I know allofmp3 is a crock of crooks.
I believe in their right to control it. If they don't want it sold in this fashion because they aren't making enough (or any) profit, so be it.
You can argue that it's a self-defeating strategy, but it's still their right.
"Makes one start to treat individuals involved in this 'music industry' like the lowlifes that they really are."
There, that sounds better
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Nice to see that the Mafia's muscle has been replaced by lawyers.
...so I'm not sure whether these people were potentially "guilty". See Fraud Act 2006. We need advice from a lawyer.
Reduce, reuse, cycle
Any ideas?
The RIAA is trying to stop allofmp3.com (operating under certain Russian copyright licensing laws) for doing the exact same thing that they are pushing to be allowed to do right here in the US. The RIAA wants to collect fees (sell if you will) for music played on radio stations (regular radio stations) regardless of whether or not the music is actually copyrighted by any of their members. This means that if a public radio station plays a few RIAA songs, but the majority are indie labels or any music not owned by the RIAA members, the RIAA gets a cut as if it was.
One can certainly argue against the moral rightness of the way the Russian copyright licensing laws work, since no American artist will ever see any of the fees that the Russian copyright organization collects. But certainly the RIAA is clearly acting morally wrong as well.
It is interesting that this cheesy gestapo has no office in the US. I went to the website to find a phone number, but I'm not paying international rates to tell someone off. =)
Your 'point' is as incoherent as it is superfluous. If party A is within the law and party B uses it's lawyers and money to harass party A despite that fact, then party B is in the wrong. If you can't understand that then there is something wrong with you.
"To me, "The music industry" seems to have become the bane of civil and modern life. As if there exist no problems in the world, no wars, no poverty, no economic issues but fucking more-cash problems of the "music industry". makes one start to treat individuals involved in this "music industry" like lowlifes in everyday life."
As far as I can tell, if you don't download music you don't own or aren't getting from a highly questionable source then you won't have any problems. Maybe I missed it but has there been a rash of people being sued from using iTunes, the new version of Napster, or local CD stores?
Ninjas don't carry tic tacs
i said "everyday life", because i didnt mean it as a metaphor, i really meant i would start treating these people like shit in everyday life.
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I think you mean, "If *I* can't execute, why can the state?" Better question.
To me, "The music industry" seems to have become the bane of civil and modern life.
Really? Musicians, and the people they pay/hire/work with to handle the business end of what they do (so they can concentrate on making music) are the 'bane of civil and modern life?' But some company that wants to rip those musicians off by not paying for their work, and then turn around and sell what they've ripped off... you consider that to be... what? a good example of civility? If civilization is marked by its ability to support people who specialize in things (like, making the music that untold millions of people seem to want, as opposed to having to go out every morning and tend to your crops before you come home at night exhausted and THEN see about making some music), then civilization is also marked by the ability for people to offer their work up for sale - and not be ripped off.
If you consider artists to be uncivil for deciding that being paid for their work, when someone wants to be entertained or informed by it, then you have SUCH a simple solution: don't pretend you like those artists. Walk away. Turn to people who ARE willing to let a Russian company sell their work without in turn getting paid for it be your source of entertainment. If you're right, that someone like Sting, or Amy Winehouse or the Dixie Chicks, or Elvis Costello, or Andrea Bocelli - whatever your tastes - or others that choose to charge for their work are the bane of civilization, then (if your point is valid, and you're at all persuasive) surely you've got a nice healthy list of complementary writers, performers, filmakers, and all of the other creative people who produce what you like without charging. And since you DO have such a list, why do you care about the artists who choose to work with traditional publishers? Just walk away, and into the loving embrace of artists who WANT a Russian dot-com to earn a living off of their unpaid work, and be happy, since you're saving (your) civilization.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
The problem lies in your phrase "highly questionable". This selling is legal (my attorney assures me that reselling gift certificates bought from AllOfMP3.com isn't breaking any laws) but the corporations involved have deemed it "highly questionable". (it isn't worth the possibility of engagement with their legal machine.) And so justice is subverted.
The creator of this post (Jacob Smith) hereby releases it, and all of his other posts, into the public domain.
hmmm.
like having innovation, free speech and competitio not being stifled by insane laws that are passed through music industry funding ?
like, "intellectual property" exploitation that walks in the verge of banning people from using certain words in daily speech ?
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God I love sound logic !!
Good. You should think about using some. The social contract that you have implicitly entered into by being a citizen of said state forbids such activity to its citizens, and allows it, under a certain set of circumstances, to certain state employees. Now, as long as the state upholds its end of the deal, the citizens should uphold theirs.
In the matter of copyright law, we have a similar contract. However, the music industry has cleverly bankrolled legislation to make sure they don't have to uphold their end of the deal, to wit, placing the copyrighted material into the public domain after a limited time. Furthermore, they also use their near infinite resources to use the legal machinery as a tool to harass law-abiding citizens. MAFIAA, indeed.
Dude,
Shhhh, you are making too much sense.
We don't want people to know allofmp3.com was a front and that no American artist ever saw one cent of the proceeds from them selling their music.
if they think it is legit it is legit.
The central question is whether AllOfMP3.com is operating legally under Russian law. Or, given the totalitarian/anarchy that is modern Russia, whether a service that does what AllOfMP3.com does, operating as it does in Russia (and operating outside Russia only on the Internet), is at risk of takedown by Russian authorities (not including their mafias, but that's a basic risk of doing business in Russia).
If AllOfMP3.com doesn't survive long enough to be tested in Russian court (and subsequently in Russian police offices), we might never know whether another bizmodel or just other outside-Russian operations could survive to be tweaked into a way that survives.
--
make install -not war
mea culpa - I just read an article about NIN's Trent Reznor. http://www.news.com.au/heraldsun/story/0,21985,217 41980-5006024,00.html and he's pretty blunt about it. These people you reference ARE lowlifes, and this is coming from one of their clients.
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How come when the music industry talks about piracy they always talk about the starving artists? But when someone points out the totally unethical behaviour on the music industries part towards said artists and exposes the fact that the said music industry is more responsible for those starving artists than any consumer could ever be they get all tough and claim it is their property? Face it the music industry looks out for the artist in exactly the same way that someone buying mp3's off of allofmp3 does. There is no difference.
well. if people oust them from society, they would have to reconsider their crap.
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... voucher re-seller on the landing!
B: Really?
C: Where do we send the invoice?
A: Waddya mean?
C: What's its merchant charge code?
A: Well, it looked a bit Bath and Wells-ish to me...
B: (getting up and going out the door) I'll go and have a look.
C: I don't know...kids bringin' 'em in here....
A: It's not me!
C: I've got three of 'em down by the bin, and the dustmen won't touch 'em!
B: (coming back in) Code number 935726217923000012/A/9-1.
C: 'Ow d'you know?
B: Barcoded on the back o' the neck. I'll call the police.
C: Shouldn't you call an economist?
A: Call the economics police!
B: All right. (shouting) The Economics Police!
we call them leeches, parasites,...
Custom electronics and digital signage for your business: www.evcircuits.com
However, the music industry has cleverly bankrolled legislation to make sure they don't have to uphold their end of the deal, to wit, placing the copyrighted material into the public domain after a limited time.
The US Supreme Court, ruling on the legality of the Bono copyright extension of a few years ago, very clearly stated that while their ruling should not in any way be interpreted to mean that copyright extension was a good idea, that "life of the author plus 70 years" (or is it 75 years?) did indeed meet the definition of "limited time" and was therefore constitutional. Until a court is willing to establish limits on what "limited time" means, there is no legal reason why this can't be extended. I fully expect Disney in roughly 30 or so years (whenever Steamboat Willie will be in threat of losing copyright) to push for 50 more years and get it.
One of the best ideas I heard was a compromise that copyright be extended, but that it require companies to actually apply for it in order to be extended. That way Disney, etc. could protect everything they wanted to and stuff that is forgotten about, like old photos from many decades ago, could fall into the public domain. Unfortunately the current law provides for a "do nothing" automatic extension of copyright for everything, which means that truly nothing will fall into the public domain again, maybe ever (assuming copyright keeps getting extended, as it probably will).
My best friend is an attorney and in fact he has nothing to do with copyright stuff at all in his legal specialty. I mentioned to him how bad this was and he was unable to understand why people and companies shouldn't be able to copyright stuff forever and have people over a 100 years from now make a living on stuff that they inherited copyrights for and had no role in creating. This illustrates exactly why copyright will be continuously extended. The US Congress is mostly attorneys and attorneys see nothing wrong with this.
Meanwhile, allofmp3's servers are painfully slow due to the huge influx of traffic from all of the publicity this is giving them.
NewslilySocial News. No lolcats allowed.
Not really, they'd simply buy a few boats and spend their lives fscking models.
Global warming is a cube.
There is no difference.
There is an enormous difference. Follow a few successful artists' business careers. They work (in starving artist mode), and some of them produce something with enough critical and commercial draw that they make some real money. MANY of them form their own production and publishing companies specifically so that they can help out or promote other "starving" artists with contracts that are favorable to the artists. And guess what: many of those company-forming artists immediately see the wisdom in joining a trade association. Just like plumbers do, auto mechanics do, authors do, and scientists do. Without the artists, there IS NO trade association. The artists, and the publishing companies they hire DECIDE TO JOIN or not. Many do not, many form their own coalitions, and many go with the bigger association because they can get more done in protecting their rights to their own work.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
The US Supreme Court ... clearly stated that ... "life of the author plus 70 years" did indeed meet the definition of "limited time" and was therefore constitutional.
You know, that's great. It must be nice to be the one party able to re-negotiate the terms of a contract. Does it work for banks? If you get a loan to purchase a home, and it comes time for your last payment, can the bank run to Congress or the courts and demand that you should continue your monthly payments for another 20 years? Name another contract that works that way.
It could be argued that life of the author plus 1e9 years is limited in the sense that it is bounded. The question is, is it excessive?
The problem was that the case was argued poorly. Due to the way the argument was presented, the SCOTUS got to rule that the provisions of the act did comply with the "limited times" clause, which they do.
What was not addressed was the legitimacy of the retroactive extension of copyright - whether that a) set the stage for effectively endless copyright, since it allows Congress to not let anything fall out of copyright, ever or b) met the "[t]o promote the progress of science and useful arts" test (which, intuitively, it seems to fail, since you can't incent artists in 1925 with legislation passwed in 2007).
I also think you're over-generalizing your assessment of attorneys. Both my mother- and father-in-law are attorneys, and have no trouble whatsoever with understanding the problems of perpetual copyright. Especially in terms of Constitutional law.
Reality has a conservative bias: it conserves mass, energy, momentum...
how long until someone creates a distributed, encrypted, peer rated, port-shifting darknet that stores every single piece of recorded music ever published. It is a rather finite amount of data.
Yes, because the right to share somebody else's creations with friends and strangers is unalienable.
Saharov and Ghandi would've been proud of your stand.
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
Out with the old - and in the the new - http://www.mp3sugar.com
Only downer with this is that all music is 256kbps
When you win the lottery and die the next day
When you get a death-row pardon two minutes too late
When you get a free ride when you already paid
When you take your first flight in 42 years and your plane crashes
When there's a traffic jam and you're already late
When there's a no smoking sign on your cigarette break
When you have 10,000 spoons and all you need is a knife
When you get good advice and didn't take it
When you meet the girl of your dreams and she introduces you to her pimp (god that always happens!)
Now, that's IRONIC !!
So some people were buying and selling gift certificates that could be redeemed to acquire songs from AllOfMP3.com. I have never heard of AllOfMP3.com until today. Why are these people in trouble?? Am I missing something?? Who cares about their legal might and deep pockets if they are absolutely wrong?? Why not gang up and fight it??
I'd like to buy credit for AllOfMP3 in the US -- in cash. Anyone know of US retail outlets carrying the vouchers? The enemy of my enemy is most certainly my friend in this case, but I'd prefer not to have my name in the database when the RIAA sets up its own death camps.
As a musician I would like to say a hearty FUCK YOU to allofMP3.com for making money off of someone else's work, but I must be reserved and save roughly 50 times more gusto for the companies the RIAA fronts for. These assholes rip-off both the artists and the consumers, at least allofMP3 only rips off the artists. AllofMP3 = free advertising for the artists, and if only 5% of your fans buy your music from a source that actually pays you then the more fans you have the better.
Sometimes I think what we need is a good old fashioned letter writing campaign, something about the implacability of 750,000 envelopes expressing our disdain and guaranteed non-patronage might get the message across, that all this forum board bitching isn't, that we're not not buy CD's because we're pirating the shit but because it is shit and we are displeased with the way you treat the few musicians who do bring us joy. But I guess I'd have to get you guys to put down the mountain dew and write a freaking letter.
What next, expect to sell vouchers for pot?
at least then they wouldnt be harming the progress of civilization
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It's justified because it's legal in the company of operation. Or were you talking morality? In that case, the RIAA argument makes a lot of sense.
There are literally tens of other clone sites of allofmp3 out there spread across the countries of the former USSR. It will only take a post on Slashdot with a list of these for the symbolic value of RIAA v allofmp3 to be rendered meaningless. The genie is out of the bottle and cat is out of the bag....
They're spending years trying to shut allofmp3 down, in the meantime, a million alternatives are cropping up.
The main thing about those sites is the fact that they sell music at prices people consider fair.
All of sudden people aren't stealing music anymore, now they're paying for it. but it's still not good enough....
To me, "The music industry" seems to have become the bane of civil and modern life.
Seen from an oblique angle, this pesky MAFIAA/IFPI outfit is perhaps doing democracy a service. How so? We all know that eternal vigilance is the price of freedom. And those lobbyists are actually exposing a flaw in the democracies of most countries: a blatant lack of vigilance! The more they buy off civil liberties [*] away from the People, and the more draconian the laws become that they buy from those all too easily corruptible legislators; the more apparent this lack of vigilance becomes.
Ultimately, democracy is not threatened by the content mafia, nor by corrupt politicians, but by the apathy of its citizens. By twisting the legal framework well beyond what it once was conceived to be (serving as an equalizer to protect the weak from the unchecked power of the mighty), MAFIAA/IFPI is just highlighting a big flaw in our contemporary democracies; a flaw I hope is not fatal if timely patched. And it's not just the content mafia. If it's not them, then it's overzealous politicians using FUD to push their "security" agenda (cf. Amnesty International's latest report). Here too, it's the apathy of the population that's killing freedom. The perpetrators are only filling in a void that our societies allowed to remain unwatched and uncared for.
IFPI's and their regional branches like the *AA's self-serving rabid behavior serves as an effective advertisement to make this lack of vigilance visible to mostly young people, who would never have given a second thought on lobbyists and the nasty way politics are run behind the curtains. And in every society, the less apathetic people are young people. By alienating them the way the MAFIAA does, IFPI et. al. are currently teaching them a lesson in applied democracy. The more they tighten their grip, the more young people will rebel (they're doing it daily by the millions on all those P2P networks), and the more they'll slip through their clutches.
If nothing else came out of the current phase of history, then it's at least a classic example of the dangers our democracies face when we fail to actively care to fight and preserve our freedom. Perhaps it's already too late for people to wake up and smell the napalm burning away the last remnants of freedom we used to enjoy and always took for granted, and maybe we'll be just sliding faster into the mud... and it's not impossible that we won't be able to pull ourselves out of the current and future mess anymore... But if this serves as a deterrent to future generations of all things we've done wrong, then all this would not have been in vain.
[*] One may argue that the right to listen to music, the right to read a book etc... are not civil liberties per se. That's right in the current state of the law, where ideas have become merchandises. But things were not so in the past. Entire civilizations emerged and flourished before without all this new-fangled "intellectual property" legal apparatus that's waving thousands and thousands of spider nets, which would finally lead to entirely blocking creativity in the long run. Perhaps it's a sign of a civilizations' decline, when all kinds of innovation get tied up by bureaucratic red tape?
cpghost at Cordula's Web.
They would be crooks if they did it in the USA. Lucky for them their country has different laws. How would you like to be called a crook for not wearing a beard?
yea.
"ripped off" of the 1 million $ more that they would be making in addition to the $20 million they already did. or a one to 10 or a 2 to 40. very very unfair. its outright civil to create a police state and implement controls over all pcs and internet in order to give them their "right" share.
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the picture you draw is a fairy tale. exists in an ideal world. artists are still starving. the publishing companies the artists "making through" found end up as acting like existing publishing companies. and no artist made publishing company can rival the big boys, who decide what the entire earth civilization will listen to/watch. this is wrong.
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