Russian Music Site Offering Legal Songs By The MB 614
An anonymous reader writes "The Sydney Morning Herald is reporting on a Russian Music site that is offering legal digital music by the MB. The site apparently has a license from the Russian Music authorities to legally distribute songs for a fraction of the price of what is being offered by iTunes and others. The report from SMH is here. Amazingly, the site offers files in any format and encoding you choose and rips it on the fly. Notifications by email follow when the songs are ready for download. Sounds a little to good to be true :)"
Obviously not rip... (Score:5, Insightful)
More importantly, has anybody tried this? I found it many months ago, but I am loath to send my credit card data to a semi-shady Russian site, and I am worried that credit card records could be used to go after people who used the site when it (inevitably) gets shut down eventually. What do people think?
The price is right (Score:5, Insightful)
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Sounds a little to good to be true :) ..Why? (Score:5, Insightful)
Who'd have thought it... Russia..the home of the brave and the free.
Comment removed (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Allofmp3.com (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Allofmp3.com (Score:5, Insightful)
That's exactly the same argument that can be used for outsourcing IT jobs. You can't have it both ways people! You can't have your cheap consumer economy in the US, and still want your jobs protected. Why not complain about the poor music industry jobs that are being "outsourced" to Russia?
Re:Allofmp3.com (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:One of these days, Alice (Score:2, Insightful)
Until you (and everyone else) start working for free, don't expect record companies to do the same. You basically have two choice: pay with money or pay with advertising. Pick one.
Why? (Score:3, Insightful)
Why does it sound too good to be true? There's no such technology? They can't possibly have all the CD titles that you're interested in?
This could have been done at least three years ago. The USian companies missed out not because of technological factors, but their stupid laws and of course, the paranoid state of mind of the RIAA.
This could have been "the" way to listen to music in this age and time... but noooo, somehow you MUST stick DRM in the files and whatnot. When will the relevant bodies realize that the more you restrict the consumers, the more they will look for an easier (and not necessarily legal) alternative.
Re:Not legal (Score:5, Insightful)
But the Berne Convention (and others) covers copyright between nations (ie: protect ours this, that, and the other-way and we'll protect yours the same). If I buy from Russia -- and its legal in russia -- than I can import it into my own country. Nothing is the matter.
Here is the real problem: Copyright is an outdated and broken concept, with all manner of issues involved now that physical scarcity of music has ended. Outside of oppressive cabals rigging the market (Koda/RIAA etc), how do you expect this all to work? It costs nothing to move $intellectual-property, so geography is irrelevant. It costs nothing to manufacture (cp mysong.wav yoursong.wav;wget http://allmusicisfree.com/yoursong.wav).
This hodge-podge of nonsense is collapsing under its own stupidity... and I say good. Its high time The People got to enjoy the benefits of our technological advances.
Re:Reason this is legal... (Score:4, Insightful)
The fact is that if it costs a radio station a small fraction of a cent per listener per song, why does the licence component of a CD that I'm going to listen to $1?? It's one price for the radio (cheap) and another for the consumer(gets screwed)
I've got karma to burn ....... (Score:0, Insightful)
Something Not Funny || Something Off Topic + Mentioning(Karma Burn || Having Karma to Burn) == Karma Points
If so..
- un1xl0ser
Re:Allofmp3.com (Score:3, Insightful)
So... c-ya! (after I graduate
While legal in Russia (Score:5, Insightful)
Just a thing to bear in mind, if you want to keep a clean path.
What makes you think . . . (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Well, it is too good to be true (Score:4, Insightful)
Because that involves a copy made (legally, we assume) in Russia. The selfsame copy is then brought here. When you listen to it, you're listening to a copy of foreign origin.
This involves a copy made HERE, itself based on a copy in Russia. When you download something, the bits on the server aren't magically sent to you -- instead a new copy is made. Since, in the end, there is a copy on your computer, and a copy on their computer, it is pretty obvious that this involved an act of copying, not an act of importation (where only one copy exists, and it's moved physically).
Do you see the difference?
If something seems too good to be true.. (Score:5, Insightful)
If they claim they're legal because "we're licensed as if we were broadcasting the material", then as far as I understand you have no right to make or keep a recording of anything they might broadcast. Broadcasting is "we broadcast it and you listen", and there's no automatic right to tape records off the radio.
It's highly possible that the reason they haven't been closed down is that taking legal action against shady Russian entities is extremely difficult at the best of times.
If they're interested in people uploading stuff *to* them in exchange for download rights, then the legitimacy of their source material seems doubtful.
Ultimately, applying Occam's razor to this story makes me wonder that if it's so spotlessly legal, why isn't everyone setting up stores like this on Russian territory?
Anyway, something here smells sufficiently fishy for me to be extremely sceptical of the wisdom of giving them money.
Re:Not legal (Score:3, Insightful)
And that's what the muppets at the RIAA need to get into their heads. People will pay for service - though they'll only pay a fair price. "copyright legality" is an insubtsantial concept that some people can be fooled into considering wortwhile, but at the end you're buying wind (quite literally in the case of music!). A service, though, is a service, a concrete thing that can't be copied at zero cost.
Daniel
Re:Allofmp3.com (Score:5, Insightful)
A company can move, source, produce and sell pretty much wherever it wants. However, as a consumer my possibilities to buy goods and services where I see fit is severely hampered.
Ever tried to buy something from an Amazon affiliate not in your part of the world? Heck, I'm in Luxembourg, and there's many articles within amazon.de that they refuse to ship to anywhere but Germany.
A Toyota Prius is 20000 USD in the US, and 25000 EUR over here. Can I import one from the US? Sure. Will Toyota US sell me one? Sure not.
Of course, I could jump through hoops and get my stuff (I sometimes do). But we're far away from having consumers being able to use globalization to his advantage...
Re:Obviously not rip... (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Allofmp3.com (Score:1, Insightful)
First of all, the reason jobs are outsourced is THEY PAY YOU LESS. So unless you are totally dedicated to your work, being in IT is not as lucrative there as it is here.
Why do you think there are still so many work visas from India in the US? My cubicle-mate is Indian, and he totally agrees with me.
Re:Allofmp3.com (Score:4, Insightful)
But most of the jobs related to the song that's being downloaded have little or nothing to do with where in the world the song is being sold.
This is no different than buying a record while on vacation, buying a record from another country over the net or buying something from iTunes while not being a US citizen.
Re:Allofmp3.com (Score:3, Insightful)
And who are you to judge? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Well, it is too good to be true (Score:5, Insightful)
Q.
Re:Obviously not rip... (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm sure Citibank isn't skeptical of the company itself per se, more that you've changed your buying habits to purchase something internationally.
BTW, this can be bad from a precedent setting perspective. Citibank will (eventually) adjust its fraud-detection settings for your account, so the next time a questionable internet-based Russian purchase happens it might not trigger a flag.
Re:Not legal (Score:4, Insightful)
(a) the Berne Convention does provide for national treatment, but typically the owner of the copyright is the first marketer _in the respective territory_, which means that although the song Russia is technically the same as the copy original provided from the parent company in the US, it is actually (in legal terms) an entirely different one because two separate legal personalities in the US and Russia own the copyright in the respective songs: so the US owner cannot ligitate against someone who copies the Russian version (capice?), nor can the Russian owner litigate against someone who copies the US version. Remember that in the case of copyright infringement, you have to _prove_ an act of copying, and thus a _chain of copies_ leading back to the original version that was infringed.
The Berne Convention does offer a "thirty-day" window in which if you publish in several countries during that period, then the owner of the work _is_ the single owner. This means that if the US owner had also published in Russia within 30 days of the release of the song, then they would own the copyright in the work, and could litigate against the Russian copyists.
(b) Copyright is not outdated: firstly, it costs time, effort and money to make these musical works: so the creators deserve to own rights in those works. This fundamental concept is never going to change. You say "it costs nothing to manufacture" - umm, how do you account for the costs of studios, equipment, people's time and effort, etc ? Sure it costs nothing to make _a copy_ of the first original copy of the work recorded in the studio, but it still costs a lot to make that first copy.
Re:Reason this is legal... (Score:2, Insightful)
Simple solution: Buy all your major-label stuff from allofmp3, and buy CDs from small bands. Somehow you get the impression that more money is going to the artists if you can go up to them after a performance and buy a CD directly from them (and buy them a drink).
Well, that's how I see it anyway.
Re:Why? (Score:3, Insightful)
I disagree with your prejudicial statement.
The article says that the Russians are paying to license this music, and your payment to the site funds that payment. That license fee goes to the artists' association, specifically to fund artists, engineers etc. in the same way that radio airtime fees are supposed to fund those involved in making the music.
Because of the price differential between countries, perhaps only a very small sum or none makes its way to U.S.-based artists. It is hard to know without seeing the figures. U.S.-based music would surely not be licensed at all in Russia if the RIAA didn't make something from doing that.
U.S.-based artists are not the only ones in the world, though. I bet there are plenty of Eastern European artists (among others) for whom Russian licensing fees represent substantial income.
-- Jamie
Good site. (Score:4, Insightful)
Best part?
It's legal.
Re:Allofmp3.com (Score:4, Insightful)
If they get too much power and abuse it (and let's face it, too much power always leads to abuse), then that can be bad. But ideally they're representing artists rights, put to that position by artists, just as good or bad as for example EFF can be.
On this planet, the RIAA does have too much power, and they do abuse it, and they don't really represent artists - they represent the labels, which just want to make money. If they could do it without artists, they would.
Re:Allofmp3.com (Score:3, Insightful)
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Allofmp3.com (Score:5, Insightful)
NO, this is not like outsourcing.
What this is doing is using the industry's geographical price discrimitation against them.
They might charge $10 for a widget in the US and only $4 in Cambodia, so what's happening here it that the same goods are still being purchased from the same company, it's just the geographic price discrimination is being avoided.
Incidentally price controls like this are illegal in the US, it's just that nobody exists to deal with them on an internaional level. Thus, you can ship a DVD that won't play in Korea, but not one which won't play in Kentucky.
Re:Allofmp3.com (Score:4, Insightful)
Nearly every successful person I know has gotten there by knowing people with money and selling things to them. One guy I know quit GE and started his own company doing exactly what he did at GE, hired his former co-workers, and outsourced himself to GE for more money (twice as much, but GE loved it since they weren't "in that field," despite dropping several mil a year into it).
While it's true that trickle down economics don't work, pumping water from upstream generally does.
Anyhow, the Grandfather's assertion that the average wage in the US will be no higher than the average wage in urban China is true, for the most part, but only because the average wage in urban China will go up at the same time ours goes down. That's one easy way to acheive global equality.
Re:Not legal (Score:4, Insightful)
It's not a matter of pricing being lower in Russia; the site is pretty obviously illegal. Many of the artists whose work is being sold (e.g. The Beatles, Led Zeppelin) have never agreed to have their work sold digitally, which is why you can't find their music on any legitimate music download service. And of course, if they're selling music for a few cents a track, they're not paying the artists and composers for the recordings.
Even if it were legal in Russia (which it clearly isn't) they clearly wouldn't have the right to sell that music anywhere else, since the companies that have the Russian rights to the music aren't the same as the companies that have the US rights, and those rights are exclusive. So even if the Russian company decided to sell music for almost nothing, they couldn't sell it to US customers, etc. This legal issue is why iTunes only sells to US customers, etc. -- to do things legally, you have to negotiate the rights to sell the music country by country.
Re:*RI* represents artists... not. Think RA* (Score:5, Insightful)
That is not correct. The *RI* organizations represent the recording industry, not artists. Recording artists are represented by organizations like the Recording Acadamy [grammy.com] and the Recording Artists Coalition [recordinga...lition.com] --organizations which are often at odds with the RIAA.
Re:Not legal (Score:3, Insightful)
$.01 per megabyte is obscene. That's $.65 for an album on MP3. An artist makes more than that on a CD sale...what do you think their cut is of this?
My buddy's sunk about $10,000 into his demo so far. They'll be lucky to recoup that selling 1000 CDs at concerts for $10. To recoup it from allofmp3.com -- a service they have never agreed to be a part of, and in Russia they don't have to be -- they'd have to receive nearly 16,0000 downloads. That is not fair. And I know you don't care about artists' costs and think the label is screwing everybody...but this is an amateur produced demo! Music is expensive to make and of limited appeal -- and "legal" overseas services that give it away are bad, bad, BAD for American artists. It's like having your sales outsourced against your will!
Re:Allofmp3.com (Score:3, Insightful)
That's exactly the same argument that can be used for outsourcing IT jobs. You can't have it both ways people! You can't have your cheap consumer economy in the US, and still want your jobs protected. Why not complain about the poor music industry jobs that are being "outsourced" to Russia?
At some point you might want to read something about the concept of Comparative Advantage, which goes back to Adam Smith I believe. You should be able to find some information about this in the context of the current outsourcing debate at The Economist [economist.com].
Re:VERY LEGAL. (Score:2, Insightful)
Word. I'm also pissed off at the FDA for preventing the free flow of untested drugs, and the FBI for restricting the free flow of raw, uncut heroin. And I'm not a big fan of the "State Police" slowing down the free flow of my neighbour's high deifnition TV into my basement.
Shit, man. The internet is threatening to destroy the viability of creating entertainment because people like you seem to think that just because it's easy to do something that it should be legal too. Remember: a painting is nothing more than some coloured oil on cloth. Can't possibly be worth more than $10. So you'd be a fool to pay more, right?
How about this... (Score:2, Insightful)
Does anyone know what UPS would charge to ship a hard drive from Russia to Yourtown, USA?
Wrong again (Score:3, Insightful)
And, since that would require all sorts of invasive precendents, it would surely take multiple SCOTUS cases to settle the issue - an issue, as you know, the SCOTUS has a long record of siding with "users" and not corporate holders. Just as they sided with home users having a right to record Disney's movies on their Sony VCRs in their homes, it's doubtful the record industry could ever win a case against a user for "importing" their own legally purchased CDs via these electronic means.
And BTW, whether you like the Berne convention or not, we're stuck with it until our own politicians get smart - you can't defend the law in one breath and then in the next say "well, I don't like that part of the law so I'm not going to argue it - as a student of law you should fucking well know better than to even try such nonsense. And, so long as Russia ia a signatory on that treaty that none of us "like," we're bound to accept their protections just as they're bound to accept ours. And in Russia (Ukraine, Poland, etc) there are far fewer protections for corporate entities when it comes to copyight (another discussion we have had before - should I cite some Polish or Ukraine law?)
And record companies may not like this fact, but they seem to have no problem living with it: Sony, Universal, BMG... these all have presence in Russia just as elsewhere. Madonna may not like her music being sold so cheap, but she has little say over it - a little something is better than whole lotta nothing, which is what she'd get is she refused to allow Maverick records to have any official presence in the country.
In short: I been using this service for a long time. I told you about it over at Arstech and no one there seemed to find it worthy of front page comment, and I've mentioned it here multiple times and yet it's remained a pretty well kept secret until now.
So, Slashdot may have finally accomplished what Berne could not - deprive me of a steady supply of cheap, quality encoded music at a fair price (cheaper even than "free" usenet, BTW). I'm sure there's a lesson in there about capitalism and the power of a free press, but right now I'm too pissed to think much about it...
Re:One of these days, Alice (Score:2, Insightful)
>They'll make it up in volume.
I know your comment was meant to be funny, but that's actually true to an extent. Just like how ads pay for free tv broadcasts, I wouldn't doubt the volume of people getting free audio online wouldn't provide a nice revenue stream for doing ads. Of course, there's nothing stopping a stream from being 90% ads and having people pay to get 45% ads instead..or was it that cable got you more channels with ads. Anyways, there's this magically thing called the radio which people have been known for years to tape record off of even though it wasn't always the best quality. Streaming audio would probably fit well into that category. I guess it's funny to me how while MS is trying to shift from per item to per time the RIAA is dead-set on doing everything on per item. I guess that's just their little way of saying MS has too little software and the RIAA has way too much music.
Re:TANSTAAFL. (Score:3, Insightful)
"Why shouldn't these artists get paid for the time and effort? We pay bankers to handle our money, cooks to make our dinner, maids to clean our houses, but we can't pay artists who actually make our lives enjoyable?"
I do go to concerts. I spend about $1000 per year on: concerts, musical theatre, movies, and sports. That is more than I pay to maids (4 visits per year, $100 per visit).
When I do something, I don't get paid after it is finished. Doesn't matter how many people use it. Yes, you my have my code in your computer RIGHT NOW. But I don't get royalties. And that's ok with me... Now, the musicians do get royalties. I would think that 1 cent over a million uses is still 100,000 dollars. More than I make, anyway. And for this, do nothing.
As to THIS being the "system of patronage extends back for countless millennia"?
I don't think so. 100 years ago the only way to hear an artist was to be there. Or listen to someone else play the music. Works *were* commissioned. Certainly, no one made money on selling recordings -- there weren't any.
I don't mind people making money selling recordings... just get it into line with costs and reasonable profit. Or I won't buy. $1 per song is FAR too much. Given that 10 cents a song pays for royalties, encoding, distribution *and* profit.
If you insist on pricing electronic recordings at $1 a song, and CDs at $15, I won't buy. [Note - WalMart - usually not known for generosity - sells some DVD movies at $4.88 CDN].
I will still go to concerts. Am I selfish and cheap? Thanks for thinking that about me, but I have purchased more CDs and sound recodings than the entire human race did before 1850. More, even. I think that make me really generous to the artists.
Ratboy.
Re:One of these days, Alice (Score:3, Insightful)
Hmm...."Back in the Day"....this was the way bands DID make their money. Unfortunately, it seems all you get today is a good looking lip-syncher...produced by the corporation, that cannot perfom live (or at least with out a LOT of electronic help).
Re:Hmmmm... (Score:1, Insightful)
Everyone and everything does.
It's been now more than 10 years since collapse of the Soviet regime.
Many things are different now.
Of course, there is a long way to go, but the progress has been immense.
Young generation does not know Soviet modus vivendi.
Mafia belongs to the first half of 90-ies.
It's very much different from what you see in a Hollywood movies...
Re:VERY LEGAL. (Score:1, Insightful)
The internet is threatening to destroy the viability of creating entertainment because people like you seem to think that just because it's easy to do something that it should be legal too.
Wow, looks like the schoolroom propoganda is working. Do you drink Pepsi for lunch there too?
So you think the whole wide world would just stop making video, music, and all other forms of entertainment if your corporate copyright power structure was disassembled, huh?
Like there's no-one out there who does art for the sake of, er, art, or pleasure? Or who can find other means of supporting themselves besides putting virtual chains around their knowledge. Or who maybe wouldn't feel the need to live like a king, or spend $50 million hyping their album.
News flash for you, dasidiot: Art would indeed survive. In fact, you might say that the art that does survive is going to be that made by the real artists, and not all the stars-in-the-eyes in-it-for-the-money corporate executives and boy bands.
Stop letting the man do your thinking for you. Try not watching TV for a few weeks, stop reading the mass-hysteria news sites, and stand up to authority from time to time. Smoke a joint, drive over 55, and drink alcohol on Sunday. Then, if you're lucky, you might just become enlightened.
P.S. This rant isn't really to convince you. You're beyond hope, and I'm sure this antagonistic little tirade is just going to help cement your position. Instead, it's for some of the people who might be on the fence over this whole copyright issue. Here's to hoping some of them fall on the right side.
Re:Allofmp3.com (Score:3, Insightful)
You never mentioned why it wasn't like outsourcing? Isn't outsourcing just companies' using the labour market's Geographical price discrimination against the employees?
Same service, two prices in two different countries. Buy from the cheap one. I fail to see how this is different except that in one case it's the evil Industry and on the other it's the valiant Workers.