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PARIS, June 1 — Rising consumer popularity is turning AllofMP3.com, a music downloading service based in Moscow, into a global Internet success story, except for one important detail: The site may well be illegal.
Jul 6, 2007 - The Russian government has closed down AllofMP3 and those who. LegalSounds.com prices are $0.09 per song, full album downloads. They also have a free download of the day, currently 'Seeing Red' by Killing Joke. People are smart and start using different mirrors and proxy addresses to access, find and download torrent files from favorite Russian torrenting sites in local Russian language. Most of the websites has similar structure and content, such as music, movies, software and games.
So great is the official level of concern about AllofMP3 that American trade negotiators darkly warned that the Web site could jeopardize Russia's long-sought entry into the World Trade Organization.
Operating through what music industry lobbyists say is a loophole in Russia's copyright law, AllofMP3 offers a vast catalogue of music that includes artists who have not permitted their work to be sold online — like the Beatles and Metallica — at a fraction the cost of services like Apple Computer's iTunes service.
Sold by the megabyte instead of by the song, an album of 10 songs or so on AllofMP3 can cost the equivalent of less than $1, compared with 99 cents per song on iTunes.
And unlike iTunes and other commercial services, songs purchased with AllofMP3's downloading software have no restrictions on copying.
Continue reading the main storyIt is an offer that may seem too good to be true, but in Russia, considered to be a hotbed of digital piracy and theft of intellectual property, courts have so far allowed the site to operate, despite efforts by the record labels Warner, Universal and EMI to aid prosecutors there.
Music industry officials say AllofMP3, which first came to their attention in 2004, is a large-scale commercial piracy site, and they dismiss its claims of legality. 'It is totally unprecedented to have a pirate site operating so openly for so long,' said Neil Turkewitz, executive vice president of the Recording Industry Association of America, who is based in Washington.
People associated with AllofMP3, which lists no telephone contacts on its Web site, declined to comment for this article when tracked down by domain-name ownership records kept by Verisign. Those records show that Ivan Fedorov of Media Services in Moscow is the owner.
AllofMP3.com says on the site that it can legally sell to any user based in Russia and warns foreign users to verify the legality within their countries for themselves. The site features a wide selection of Russian music, but is written in English with prices listed in United States dollars.
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AllofMP3 asserts its legality by citing a license issued by a collecting society, the Russian Multimedia and Internet Society.
In most countries, the collecting societies that receive royalty payments for the sale or use of artistic works need reciprocal agreements with overseas copyright holders, according to agencies that represent right holders.
According to Russia's 1993 copyright law, however, collecting societies are permitted to act on behalf of rights holders who have not authorized them to do so. Collecting societies have thus been set up to gather royalties for foreign copyright holders without their authorization. Infringement cases have also affected foreign-produced software, films and books.
The result is that numerous organizations in Russia receive royalties for the use of foreign artistic works, but never pass on that money to the artists or music companies, according to the International Confederation of Societies of Authors and Composers, the umbrella organization for collecting societies.
'These collecting agencies are thieves and frauds because they accept money while pretending to represent artists,' said Eric Baptiste, director general of the confederation. 'They play off a bizarre aspect of the Russian law that we are lobbying to change.'
Consumers have been flocking to the site, particularly from Britain, where a survey in March ranked AllofMP3 second only to iTunes in popularity among self-described music enthusiasts surveyed by XTN Data.
Amazon.com's Web site rating service, Alexa, ranks AllofMP3 as having the 986th highest level of traffic of any site on the Web over the past three months.
Use in the United States reached 345,000 unique visitors in April, an increase of 57 percent over January, but a tiny fraction of the 19 million that used the iTunes software online, according to Comscore, a service that monitors the habits of Internet users.
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Continue reading the main storyBack when I first started complaining about how a 99 cent song (purchased at the iTunes Music Store) couldn't be played back on my $20,000 whole-home entertainment system (a shining example of the problem with DRM technology), a bunch of people suggested that I could legally buy music that would work from a Russian-based source of unprotected MP3 files called AllofMP3.com. It seemed too good to be true. Then, after I did a little homework, I found my instincts to be right. A lot of people outside of Russia were trying to get AllofMP3.com shut down. That was more than a year ago, and, to this day, AllofMP3.com is still up and running and probably getting more business than ever now that it's in the crosshairs of the US government. That's right. A music pirate in Russia is causing such a stir in the international copyright community that America's top trade official is saying that Russia shouldn't be allowed as member of the all-exclusive WTO club unless it shuts the site down. According to Reuters:
Russia should shut down a pirate music Web site that is robbing U.S. recording companies of sales if it wants to become a member of the World Trade Organization, the top U.S. trade official said on Wednesday.
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'I have a hard time imagining Russia becoming a member of the WTO and having a Web site like that up and running that is so clearly a violation of everyone's intellectual property rights,' U.S. Trade Representative Susan Schwab told reporters after a speech to a services industry organization.
I never did end up buying music from AllofMP3.com. I respect copyrights and have lived in suffrage. Even though I'd gladly drop a few hundred bucks for music a year, I don't buy songs online since I can't get them to work where I need them to without breaking the law. So, I just don't bother buying music at all (not a good net result if you're in the music business).
I also never got an answer to the question I asked in my last posting about AllofMP3.com:
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But here’s a question: Let’s say I get a hold of a DRM-free version of some song from a site like AllofMP3.com that’s still up and running (the fact that it’s not shut down yet leads me to believe that the Russian authorities are not yet convinced of the site’s illegality). If I wanted to make sure the copyright holders got whatever royalties were due to them, how would I do that? In other words, where do I send the check?
The record business doesn't want to answer that question and I'm sure you can figure out why. But what about the artists?