Slashdot Mirror
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?
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.
Read radical news here
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.
Civil disobedience also means going to jail and suffering the consequences of your actions.
GPL Deconstructed
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.
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
And we ALL know the RIAA supports full compensation for artists as well. Oh, wait.
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.
Support NYCountryLawyer RIAA vs People
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.
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 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...
"parent is modded funny, but its an informative sort of statement.. do some research and find out how much, exactly, artists are compensated for cd sales by the riaa.. i think you'll find several conflicting points of data, all well below a "reasonable" amount. (think fractions of a percent)"
I've talked to people who've done quite well on sales through iTunes -- the $0.15 per track estimate is about right, in the instances I've confirmed. It's actually much higher than that for many indie artists (whose labels tend to pay them more), and unsigned artists who use CDBaby make much more.
Selling 1,000 albums and making $0.15 per track will only net you $1,200 -- but those same copies downloaded from allofmp3 will net you something approaching fuck all. And, I know we all like to think of artists as living a life of luxury, but you have to understand that for many artists, that is simply not the case. They need that $1,200 to pay the rent. A check from CDBaby or your record label for $1,200 will help you pay the rent. A non-existent check from allofmp3 will not.
You can talk about how a pirated copy from allofmp3 might ultimately help you, as it might create the interest which might allow you to travel to the pirate's town to perform live, where he might buy a ticket, or even buy a t-shirt. But paying the rent in the here and now beats pleasing some random pirate who might buy a shirt.
If you disagree, come to work for me for free. I can use some coders, some designers, and some editors and copyrighters. I might recommend you to my friends. If you believe that abstract concepts like giving your work away for free and making others happy are more important the realities of selling your work for money to pay the rent, let that start with you.
Sitting in my day care, the art is decopainted.
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....