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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."
Ha! Silly Russians! In Capitalist America, copyright law violates YOU!
Tags != Comments, and -1 (Troll) != -1 (I Would Respond Angrily To This Poster So They Must Be Trolling)
Russia has been flexing it's muscles lately in many fields, to re-establish itself as a power in the world. I would not be surprised if this is part of that muscle-stretching exercise.
Then again it could also just be a case of IP laws not synching up between Russia and elsewhere in the world.
I wonder if this is how foreign nations plan to break the U.S., by bootlegging our digital commodities and harming our most influential industry?
Maybe finally the RIAA will realize that allofmp3's pricing scheme and business model works and proves that if you price it right and don't use DRM, people will readily pay for music even if it is available for free on P2P.
allofmp3 provided/provides:
A great rating/linking system - "People who bought this also bought...","Similar artists..." - Great way to get "the word" out on new music without any advertising costs whatsoever.
Convenience - No DRM, no "special" download app that tied you to Windows (even if just for downloading). (Yes, there was allTunes, but you could always just download using a normal old browser)
Selection - allofmp3's selection was better than any other online music store I've used, except possibly for iTMS, although due to the DRM I haven't touched iTMS since PyMusique/SharpMusique stopped working.
They also happened to have great prices, but I'd happily pay double the prices of what allofmp3 charged.
Rather than try and sue them out of business, the RIAA should instead drive them out of business the capitalist way - with some nice good competition. Offer the same selection, convenience, organization, and interface as allofmp3, and compromise prices between allofmp3's (admittedly too low) and the RIAA's (way too high for "impulse buys" of tracks/albums I'm not sure about.
While the per-track/per-album price of allofmp3 is much lower, many people (myself included) spend MUCH more money in total there because at allofmp3's prices, there is little risk to buying a whole album as an "impulse buy" when you came for just a single track. RIAA pricing encourages single-track purchasing (odd, since the RIAA is so desperate to encourage full-album purchases.)
...just changed names for a bit (to MP3sparks.com). I had a balance on AllofMP3, heard that 'sparks was a front, so I logged on using my 'MP3 ID and, sure enough, they'd "transferred" my balance. And guess what? Alltunes (their download tool) never stopped working either, and without me having to change a single setting.
- Despite popular opinion, I am not perfect.
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
Everybody must be busy downloading MP3s!
I give each company I deal with a different email address so I know when they have sold my address to spammers. Shortly after allofmp3.com was being shut down for the first time, I started getting spam to the email address that I had given to allofmp3.com. Remember, that address was never given to anyone except allofmp3.com.
I guess they figured if they can't make money selling music that they don't have any rights to, then the would supplement their income by selling out their customers' email addresses to worthless spammers.
Pretty sad actually.
p.s. funny, but true coincidence... The capcha word for me to post this anonymously is "poacher"
So, it's ok for big corporations to off shore things like manufacturing + tech support to cheaper countries.
But when another company takes advantages of its laws and it effects the company here. Oh noes!
Considering that Russia is now part of WTO, it will be interesting to see what will happen. Russia obeyed their law and agreements that we had with them. But will USA now take this to WTO and object to this? My guess is that USA will lose this appeal, and that will cause numerous other countries to allow other companies in on similar companies. Of course, this comes on top of the WTC looking at allowing Antigua and other countries that were denied off shore betting from USA.
In the end, this could pretty much negate all that W. tried to accomplish during his 8 years. That is the large American companies keep their copyrights under draconian conditions, and receive large royalties.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
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
If you want to violate Russian copyright law, you pretty much have to walk up to the artist and punch them directly in the mouth, and even then it's a pretty close legal call.
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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The big problem is that the amount paid to ROMS is incredibly small and has not been negotiated with the rights holders or artists.
Well that's an amusing argument, considering that the US *ALSO* has a statutory licensing law and that rate has also not been been negotiated with the rights holders or artists.
Oh wait, I forgot to echo back to you the the part about the amount paid being incredibly small. Oops, my bad. Well lets see, the royalty rate under US law for a company sending the identical MP3 file to someone, compared to the Russian rate is... accrding to my calculator.... hmmm lets see line up the decimal point there....
Ah there we go! It's a multiplier of about TWENTY difference in royalty rate!
WOW! That's a frigin huge difference in royalty rate!
Under Russian law AllOfMP3.com has to pay TWENTY TIMES MORE in royalty rate than Pandora.com had to pay in royalty rate under US law when they sent me the exact same MP3 file. Yep, that's right, the Russian royalty rate is vastly higher than the US royalty rate.
You are absolutely welcome to say that Russian royalty rates should be higher, but you cannot argue that there is anything wrong or illegitimate about the principle or general operation of that law. In legal principle and in fundamental aspects the Russian law is effectively identical to US law. There are differences in some details, but absolutely not in anything altering the basic legitamacy of that law.
Russian law is absolutely legitimate
The "we pay royalties to ROMS" claim is a smokescreen to hide the fact that allofmp3.com is not paying enough money to the creators to actually sustain their work.
Two points. First of all the RIAA refusing to accept the money and refusing to pass that money on to their artists... and prohibiting their artists from directly collecting their money themselves is a public relations and political ploy. It is a small price to pay for the wonderful chant that RIAA artists are not getting paid at all, and to back up their bogus claim that the law itself is illegitimate.
Secondly, I would fully welcome increasing the royalty rate in Russian law. It is fundamentally a legitamate and GOOD law, and yes it should direct more money to the artists. And the US law royalty should also be massivly increased to match the Russian rate... provided that some defective-by-design arbitrary clauses in US law were removed to match Russian law... for example the US law prohibits sending more than three songs from a single artist or more than two songs from a single album within a single hour. Crank up the royalty rates to pay artists more and get rid of the (US) arbitrary restrictions on the timing of sending songs.
Of course that is the LAST thing the RIAA wants. They don't care squat about how well their artists get paid. And in fact they aren't particularly thinking about what rate they are getting paid on it either. What they are in a frenzy over is that fact that the broader market effect would be to more open opportunities to INDIE musicians. The RIAA's very existence is founded upon artists *NEEDING* to sign their soul away in an RIAA Label contract. If new artists find a broader marketplace more conducive to indie survival, the RIAA's influx of new lifeblood starts drying up. It doesn't matter what royalty rate the RIAA picks up in the short term if they lose control and indie artists are no longer forced to sign up with the RIAA middleman.
A good statutory license means that the RIAA (and their artists) get paid their due, but that the RIAA lose their VETO power to shut down any music enterprise at will, lose the power to extort other companies into compliance.
It's easy to dismiss the rights holders as "a bunch of rich musicians" who aren't earning a few extra million
Actually I'm thinking more in terms of "lots of the poor musicians should be making more tens of thousands each... a living wage.
An indie artist could be reasonably pleas
- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.