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Allofmp3 Restarts Business
An anonymous reader writes "With a pretty short message on their blog, Allofmp3 announced that they will resume their music store soon. According to a Russian court, their music store did not violate any copyright law in Russia, so there was no reason for them to keep it closed."
Bored one day I was using Google to find a ringtone for a friend and happened to drop on AllOfMP3, (just clicking through the list as one does,) and was presented by a page from my ISP saying it was blocked. I found it a little disconcerting that my ISP is deciding who I can communicate with.
For a moment I thought it's no longer the net I grew up with.
As I wasn't particularly interested in finding the ringtone or going to AllOfMP3 anyway thought I'd alleviate my boredom by investigating how they'd done this. Turns out they've only poisoned their DNS. So if you get the correct IP address from somewhere else and stick it in your hosts file you can work around it.
So the net returned back to normal: identified censorship as an error and routed 'round it.
Whew!
threadeds blog
It's "their". Actually, it's "... rainbows out of their asses".
Allofmp3 payed ROMS, but the RIAA's russian branch (IFPI) refused to take payment.
p i-refused-to-recieve-royalties-in-russia/
http://blogs.allofmp3.ru/music_news/2007/08/27/if
What would you like them to do, start mailing cheques directly to the artists?
Sources: allofmp3 blog, which links to russian papers.
DJ kRYPT's Free MP3s!
One irritating thing about Anonymous Cowards is that they are generally too lazy to just have a look for themselves, and post random gibberish that just bungs up the tubes.
So suggest you try any of Cybercity, Tele2, Telia, and TDC and thereby determine the validity of the original post for yourself.
There again, if I wasn't so bored I wouldn't have wasted the time doing the rounds of checking the various ISPs myself and replying.
threadeds blog
You know, actually, allofmp3 does pay royalties in Russia to ROMS (an agency setup under Russian law by the Russian government). The issue is that western companies do not recognize ROMS and instead 'demand' that Russian media companies deal with the equivalent of the Russian RIAA.
So what he is doing here is supporting an organization which is battling the influence exerted by the RIAA while legally distributing DRM free music.
Admittedly, there is a question of whether the amounts involved adequately compensate artists but, honestly, is not virtually any system better than what the RIAA promotes.
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No, it's more like he walks into your store and offers you $0.01 for a case of beer, you refuse, a passing police officer reminds you that the $0.01/case price is fixed by law and declared to be fair , and he walks out of the store with the beer.
AllOfMP3 didn't! The Russian government named its price, and AllOfMP3 complied.
...and that's exactly the way it should be, since AllOfMP3 wasn't committing it, according to Russian law -- which, incidentally, is the only law that matters in this discussion, whether you like it or not!
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
You equate the Russian law to illegitimate legalized theft, however the Russian law involved is largely identical to US law in principle and operation.
.MP3 extension and there you go. Of course if we all close our eyes real hard we can pretend that there actually is any technical difference between a stream and a download, and we can pretend that MP3 file isn't sitting there on your harddrive, and if we squeeze our eyes shut REALLY REALLY HARD AND NO ONE PEEKS, then in a week or so the operating system will automagically delete all of the downloaded MP3 files sitting in your temp folder and *poof* the download never actually happened! Closing our eyes worked!
:) Those damn evil Russians allowing sending of MP3 files over the internet without the copyright holder's permission on the exact same statutory license legal basis as US law allows sending of MP3 files over the internet without the copyright holder's permission, and then Russia having the audacity to
Both US law and Russian law grant a statutory license for any company to send absolutely any music over the internet, both US law and Russian law say that music may be sent in any format (including MP3), both US law and Russian law grant permission to do so without the permission of the copyright holder - or even to do so against the express dis-permission to do so from a copyright holder, both US law and Russian law designate a national collective body to receive the payments and to distribute those payments to the copyright holders, both US law and Russian law dictate what those royalty rates will be.
For example Pandora.com is a US company operating under that largely identical law and sending MP3s to people perfectly legally.
So what *is* the difference between US law and Russian law? Well there are basically two significant differences. US law has a couple of restrictions trying to prevent it from looking like a "store". If someone requests a specific song, you must wait at least an hour before sending it. You can't announce what music you are going to send. You can't send more than three songs from the same artist or two songs from the same album within any given hour. Probably one or two other quirky rules. But largely it boils down to that first rule - if someone wants to in effect "buy" a specific song download you have to wait at least an hour before initiating the transfer. Oh, and US law says the company can't *TELL* you that they sent you a download. Yeah, the good old "lets close our eyes real hard and pretend the facts of reality don't exist and maybe they will go away". Pandora.com "looks" like a "streaming" radio, and they don't *tell* you they sent you a 128kbps MP3 file download. But they did. If you take a look in your system temp folder, all the MP3 files are sitting there. They are named "Access-1" and "Access-2" etc, and they have no file extension. You just rename the file and tack on the
Oh wait.... I almost forgot. I said there were basically TWO differences between US law and Russian law! It wouldn't be very fair at all for me write that rather long paragraph on the first difference and then quietly exit without telling what that second significant difference is, now would it?
Well the other difference is the different royalty rates. Yeah, I guess I have to admit that is a pretty important difference. Not just an important difference, but a LARGE difference. In fact it works out to about twenty times difference in royalty rate. Yeah, a twenty time difference in money for the artists isn't even even in the same ballpark. Russian law and US law don't set anywhere near the same payments for artists.
Oh wait... I think I might have been a bit unclear there on the difference between US law and Russian law, and particularly about those royalty rates. It's Russian that sets a twenty times higher payment rate for artists, and it is US law that sets twenty times lower payment rate for artists. Sorry if maybe you got the impression it was the other way around
- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
Might I remind you that statutory licensing is absolutely legitimate, and that the US also has fundamentally equivalent statutory licensing law, and that in fact the Russian law states that AllOfMP3.com has to pay a royalty rate TWENTY TIMES HIGHER than the royalty that US law states that Pandora.com has to pay for sending the exact same MP3 file.
Actually I'd gladly support increasing the Russian royalty rate and massively increasing the US royalty rate to match, if we also eliminated a few defect-by-design nonsense tacked onto the US law (such as the arbitrary prohibition against sending more than three songs from the same artist or more than two songs on the same album in a single hour).
If you think statutory licensing is illegitimate, you are just plain wrong. It is a vital component of the copyright law of probably every country on earth. In fact even the RIAA itself touts statutory licensing as a good thing on their website! (Oops, revision.... the current RIAA text on Statutory Licenses is rather more drab than the text I recall finding a year or more ago, but it still makes the point that the RIAA absolutely admits the legitimacy of statutory licensing as a component of copyright law.) The RIAA is just extremely very self serving on the subject. Any statutory licensing that is helpful and profitable to the RIAA is a Good Thing, and any Statutory Licensing that threatens to PAY and HELP artists while lessening the RIAA's stranglehold gatekeeper position is evil theft. The RIAA very lifeblood is that fact that any new artist pretty much *has* to sign away his soul to an RIAA label to have any chance of making money at all. Any technology or change or law that enables indie artists to be successful without signing into an RIAA contract is a death threat to the RIAA. If new artists don't have to join the RIAA, the RIAA shrivels and dies with no function and no new business.
The Russia situation is a part of that life or death struggle for the RIAA. They don't care about the short term dollars. They are fighting to hold their long term job as the gatekeeper between artists and customers. The way Russian law is set up there is far more freedom for any and all stores or other online music activites to carry any and all artists, RIAA-signed or not, and more opportunity for non-mainstream artists to get exposure, and for royalty payments to go to indie artists without passing through an RIAA middleman. The LAST thing on earth the RIAA wants is for those royalty rates to go up and for artists to get paid good money without the RIAA leeching a slice of the pie. If this were directly about money, the RIAA would GRAB any and all the money they were already legally entitled to as any proper company world, and they would simply be fighting for an increased royalty rate.
Indie stores and indie radio and indie artists and indie popularity equals death to the RIAA. The RIAA doesn't even break even on until an album sells around a quarter million copies. They can only make a profit if they sell a limited number of different mass market albums in a limited number of different genres. But the markets are fracturing... larger numbers of smaller artists in larger numbers of genres and subgenres. Artists who may sell a few tens of thousands of copies to narrower more specialized audiences. An indie might be quite happy with the profits selling 50,000 units, but an RIAA Label would lose their shirts. And collectively these 50,000 unit indie pests are eating into the market for million unit mass market Titteny Spears clones. Anything that threatens the RIAA control... anything that opens the market place... anything that aid the rise of 50,000 unit indie pests... it chokes off the RIAA's air supply. Statutory licensing on the internet... no matter what the royalty rate artists get and no matter how much the RIAA profits off of they royalties on their catalog of old and current artists.... it stores and radio and o
- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.