Slashdot Mirror
Alltunes.com Lets Users Download AllofMP3 Songs
Stony Stevenson writes with word that, although AllofMP3.com was shut down by the Russian Government this week, customers from the site who have existing credit can still purchase songs through its downloadable windows desktop and smartphone client, allTunes.com. From the article: "A former AllofMP3.com user, who spoke to Computerworld on the condition of anonymity, purchased songs with his existing credit from the allTunes software client today and experienced no trouble doing so... AllofMP3's six million users will no doubt be delighted they can use their leftover credit to purchase songs, but the site's longevity hangs in the balance. Just days after the Russian Government shut down AllofMP3.com, its sister site, MP3Sparks.com, suffered the same fate."
What I don't understand, why aren't people reading their own comments (proof-reading there words, it's common in written speech)? I understand the logic behind poor grammar, but why support an author that cannot produce comprehensible English?!? (I understand they also don't produce comprehensible German, but I don't care about that) Is writing proper English that difficult for many people?!? Perhaps I should write another article which explains to the user how to do this? I had a previous article published on englishnewswire.net, but that was written in or around 2000, and since I can't contact the englishnewswire site Op's, I can't update the article (using Punctuation and capital Letter's creatively). Or perhaps people are just too lazy to bother trying to communicate clearly?!?
Kid-proof tablet..
Whether or not you believe what AllOfMp3.com was doing was illegal or unethical, it has got to be at least a little worrisome that a group of American corporations can effectively control the legal system of another major nation.
In my more paranoid moments, I might consider this evidence for an upcoming shift from nation-state to corporation-state as the global political unit. Then again, I'm also prepared for the inevitable zombie outbreak, so perhaps you oughtn't listen to me.
Reality has a conservative bias: it conserves mass, energy, momentum...
A tiny minority is actually concerned about who is paid. The rest want to have convenient (illegal or not) access to songs, and ripping your own CDs is not convenient enough to many people.
This is exactly what's at issue. Buying CDs and ripping them is more difficult than simply downloading them, or paying a site a few pennies to download them. AllofMP3 was so popular because for a couple cents getting music was even more convenient. You didn't even have to search through pirate sites to find them, they were all there in one place. They paid for the music because it was convenient, not because they wanted to make sure money went to the artists.
Don't worry; they'll be resurrected in Antigua, now that the US has lost in the WTO dispute and Antigua declared it was free to retaliate by ignoring US copyrights.
Looks like an ongoing game of Whack-a-Mole.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
"Most often, buying music CDs doesn't pay the band, it pays the labels (unless you bought the CD from a band who recorded and produced the music themselves, in which case it's probably a burned disc anyway). If the band has been backed by a label, they've already been paid by the label to license their music and sell it."
That's a bit backward from how most record contracts work. Contracts typically use a "the artist gets paid last" scenario, where royalty payments are held back and applied to the costs of production until they've been met.
If, at the time that you buy the CD, the CD has not yet reached the point of profitability, two things happen:
If the first point is confusing, consider the situation of making a donation to a local public TV or radio station. Say they need $100K to meet their budget and have collected $10K so far. An AllOfMP3 fan might state that donating $50 at this point would be useless, as the station will still not reach their goal, but the reality is that the $50 donation puts them $50 closer to reaching their goal.
The "pirate your music, but support the band by seeing the show" argument falls down when you do the math. If you pirate ten CDs a week, that's ten concerts you need to see a week -- that gets to be expensive, and a time sink. Then, of course, that there's the reality that not all the artists whose music you pirate are going to be able to play when and where you want them to. In most cases, when we pirate music, our actual contribution to the artists' livelihood is nil, despite our best intentions.
"Buying it used? Doesn't that defeat the purpose of trying to support the band? Say someone buys a CD for $14. They listen to it for a while, then it ends up at a used CD store once they're bored with it. I go in and buy the same CD for $6. The record label still only made that first $14. The only people that gain from used CD sales are used CD stores."
There are a couple of other benefits of buying a used CD vs. pirating it or downloading it from a Russian site. First, it's unquestionably legal, no matter how much the record companies would like to stop it. And, you support your local economy, vs. some Russian guy. I love having local record stores with ample selection of used CDs, but these establishments only stay in business with enough patronage.
Sitting in my day care, the art is decopainted.
Thus, they argue that the "rights" of which you speak are fictitious and illegitimate (or at least overly broad). The "intellectual property" which you refer to is seen as an oxymoron and antithetical to progress and free culture. I won't go into the arguments any further--they have been described in eloquent detail many times on Slashdot.
The extent to which moral disagreement with copyright justifies civil disobedience is debatable. I'll give you that. However your characterization of the copyright reformist ideals as "childish claptrap" is quite unfair.
The art of parody is lost on the grammar Nazi.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.