Russia Agrees To Shut Down AllOfMP3.com 550
Pro-SEO writes, "An official document (PDF), dated November 19, summarizes an agreement between the U.S. and Russia in which Russia has agreed to close down AllofMP3.com, and any sites that 'permit illegal distribution of music and other copyright works.' The agreement is posted to the Web site for the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative. It summarizes the joint efforts of the two countries to fight content piracy, an issue in which Russia and Eastern Europe figure prominently." From the document: "This agreement sets the stage for further progress on IPR issues in Russia through the next phase of multilateral negotiations, during which the United States and other WTO members will examine Russia's IPR regime."
Re:Asshats (Score:5, Informative)
Yes, for I am not an asshat.
Possible effects (Score:5, Informative)
1. Allofmp3.com will be closed, law or not, if the top of the government, i.e. Putin personally, orders it. Our government regularly follows such orders regardless of the law (by the way I'm not happy at all with it). The question is if Putin finds it fitting to "bow to the demands" of a foreign state, which I hope he will not, for the national pride reasons.
2. A slower solution that would satisfy the U.S. in the internet trade would be changing our Law on Copyright and Neighboring Rights [wikisource.org]. Here it depends on the Duma, which I think will not act on this without a request from the executive branch (see above). (Even given such a request, Duma may decide to refuse to bow to external demands, or simply not see it a high priority in their lawmaking.)
3. "Keeping raids at the same level" is not going to stop domestic sale of unlicensed disks. I often hear staff of media outlets complaining about raids and mass confiscations of their stock, but all that it has achieved by now is intermittent supply of some quality DVD copies (like DVD-9 of obscure titles), and somewhat higher prices (at most +50%).
Re:Asshats (Score:5, Informative)
Allof MP3 offered to pay royalties. All anyone had to do was fill out a form. The **AAs refused to deal with them, so they could do exactly what they've done today: call them pirates and get the US govt to force them out of business.
Re:Asshats (Score:3, Informative)
Just so you are aware, most people in the UK are very pissed off with the US (or more accurately, Bush and his cronies) as well.
Re:Asshats (Score:5, Informative)
Because they refused to take it.
Re:Asshats (Score:5, Informative)
Or this one [vai.com] from Steve Vai.
RIAA Strikes Again (Score:4, Informative)
I've had enough.
We don't need the copyright cartel to handle distribution and go after the pirates anymore. We definitely don't need them to set the prices, pocket most of the revenue, and randomly sue anyone who comes into contact with the music.
So let's see a list of sites that distribute (for pay or for free) music outside of the cartel, directly on behalf of the artists. I'll only do business with sites that offer Ogg Vorbis files and that let me listen to the music before deciding if I want to buy it.
I'll start:
Music is Here! [musicishere.com]
Independent Music Online [ind-music.com]
On Classical [onclassical.com]
Re:Asshats (Score:4, Informative)
The EU market isn't quite that big, but the argument you're making is valid anyway.
In the excellent CIA World Factbook [cia.gov], we find that the purchasing power partity GDP numbers for the US, EU and the world are:
US: 12.31 trillion [cia.gov]
EU: 12.18 trillion [cia.gov]
World: 60.63 trillion [cia.gov]
In other words: EU and the US each have 20% of the world's economic power.
This is all fine and well, but the problem is that the US is behaving as if it was still 1945, when the US was the economic giant of the world, and nobody else came close.
Especially in IP matters, the US has pursued a very agressive course against most other countries in the world. So far the US has managed to get away with this strategy, but it hasn't made the US any new friends around the world.
Looking at the GDP numbers and thinking about how the percentages will shift in the future, it's not obvious that the attitude "do as we say, or else..." will work indefinitely. If you want to behave like a bully and dictate the terms for everybody else, you'd better be considerably stronger than everybody else if you want to get away with it. And the US ain't, to put it bluntly.
It is quite possible that the RIAA/MPAA dictated strong arm tactics of the US government may one day start to backfire. When it does, that could be start of some very interesting times.
Re:Asshats (Score:5, Informative)
And according to the Russian laws that AllOfMP3 diligently followed, so can anyone else who has possesion. So far AllOfMP3 have been operating as a legitimate business, regardless of what your opinion on the matter is.
Re:Asshats (Score:3, Informative)
It's the problem that ROMS (the Russian version of the **AA) does not have a standing agreement with the RIAA and the MPAA. Allofmp3 paid the required royalty fees to ROMS, which then failed to pay **AA. So where is it Allofmp3's fault?
They took advantage of a dubious legal situation, to their own immense financial gain, using someone else's content.
Re:Damn that WTO (Score:3, Informative)
Anyway, I think lib.ru is to remain. It is well accepted by the whole Russian-speaking internet community, and it is a non-commercial resource. Also it has a lot of stuff published with an explicit permission. It won't be gone.
Re:Asshats (Score:2, Informative)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Howard [wikipedia.org]
At that time, many in the UK saw Labour (Blair) as the only option, this to the point where Liberal (a third party in US terms) loyalists would vote for Blair just out of hatred for Howard's conservatives.
Re:Oh, well (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Our rights to get robbed? (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Asshats (Score:1, Informative)
Anyhow, it is rather jarring in this context; most people would use "carte blanche".
Re:Asshats (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Asshats (Score:3, Informative)
"Why would the RIAA, a cartel, lower prices?"
Because record companies are ultimately in competition with each other, as well as in competition with other sources of entertainment. There are hundreds of labels who are members of the RIAA, and thousands more which are not.
That's why CD prices have been in freefall over the past several years. $18 - $20 CDs were pretty common five years ago; the average price of a new CD is now sub-$14.
Re:Asshats (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Asshats (Score:4, Informative)
Prove it: (Score:4, Informative)
It's a known fact that the numbers in recording companies books are magical. They are sued and loose every year for underreporting profits for individual artists. They just keep doing it because they get away with it often enough to make it profitable.
For one example from the video industry:
For the record, that's over 1% of the gross from the theatrical release of the movie.
If you want cooking the books, look no farther than the 15% "breakage" that record companies deduct from the digital sales through iTunes.
Some more comments about similar practices (Score:3, Informative)
What would it feel like to you if one day you got notice that this overseas online store decided to start selling your whole entire catalog to customers worldwide without any permission or consent whatsoever, made from dubious (and inferior) pirated sound sources, or at best ripped from CDs if those were even commercially available, as many of AllOfMP3's customers have come to realize once they start downloading the product? This is basically what was happening, as far as I gather these people already had another earlier site which got shut down, all they did is try and exploit loopholes in Russian and international law, and leverage this to hopefully legitimize their business model by sheer brute force.
There are several disturbing points which are not really made clearly by anyone yet, the first being that the type of income which is usually payed to ROMS (as someone already pointed out) is customarily made for the same types of payments that radio or TV stations make to the song's publishers when there is airplay, in other words some form of compulsory license which translates to a very low income figure usually set by that country's laws addressing public broadcast; this amount usually strictly only covers the publishing rights to a song. While this does (in theory) compensates the songwriters and publishers, it pays nothing whatsoever to the actual owners of the sound recording, who are not necessarily the same entities.
In most every country, radio and TV play does not usually compensate the owners of the sound recording either, but any sale to the public stipulates that the amount payable to the owner should be negotiated in good faith between the recording's owner and the selling entity. As far as I know, there is no country in the world where someone can walk off the street and decide to start selling your music legally for whatever price they feel, just because they have unilaterally decided to grant themselves that right.
The other part of this bit of 'truthiness' is that even if - so far - AllOfMP3 was able to skirt commonly accepted international trade practices by exploiting the murky Russian legal loopholes in question, there is no question that a number of keys point should have been respected on their part in order for them to maintain the type of legitimacy their recent PR-stunt 'email press conference' hinted they were trying to gain:
I well realize that similar things took places during the Gold Rush and at the time The West was
Re:Nothing unusual is happening here. (Score:3, Informative)
The thing you forget is that by default all ideas, inventions, and performances belong to the public domain and will eventually be there. All forms of IP are artificial constructs which are supposed to be contracts between the creator and society - as represented by the government - to encourage the growth of that body of public domain works. There is no natural right to own an idea. It is perfectly acceptable for different countries, and therefor societies, to determine that someone else's contract is not suitable for their society.
Moreover, your argument doesn't reflect the facts. Russian law says that the artists must be compensated - at a rate set by the Russian Govt - and that the way to receive your share of the compensation is to go through ROMS. It's no different than the way the US handles compulsory licensing for public performances - there are 2 or 3 agencies that collect funds & disperse them to their members based on performance records and at a rate determined by the Library of Congress. If you do not belong to one of these agencies, you don't get paid. Because no physical media changes hands, the Russian law determines any digital audio transfer over the internet to be a performance. US law determines only streamed audio to be a performance. Given the proliferation of programs which convert streams to MP3's I think the Russian approach is much more practical and reflective of the reality of the situation.
It's about power (in this case, price-fixing) (Score:2, Informative)
Free trade is all about lowering restrictions and barriers to the movement of goods and capital across national borders. This has worked out well for the owners of capital. In a place like China, where the average income is not much more than $1/day, you can buy cheap labor; the produced goods flow back to the First World, where you can sell at a much higher price, but lower than the cost of the good if it was produced using First World labor.
What the RIAA and similar organizations absolutely can not allow is for consumers to employ the same principles. When you buy a song from AllofMP3.com, you pay about US$0.05 - but adjusted for purchasing power parity, that works about to about a US dollar in terms of what you can buy in Russia (roughly, it's been a while since I looked this up). In other words, to a Russian, AllofMP3.com sells songs (although unencumbered by DRM) for about the same real price as an American pays for a song at iTunes.
Thanks to the Internet, there is no real (i.e. technical or physical) reason why the American can't buy a song "in Russia" at "Russian prices" - so of course the American will, for the same reason that many retirees may choose to move to a lower-price economy to live off their pensions at a higher standard of living, or companies may buy their labor in Third World nations. AllofMP3.com is simply one of many situations where ordinary people, as opposed to corporations, make direct benefit off free trade. All of these examples, you might note, are of wealthier people benefiting from access to lower price markets.
For the RIAA (and similar orgs like the MPAA), this would be the collapse of the price-fixing system they have carefully constructed. The reason that a Asian-region DVD won't play in the US is because if it did play, there would be no reason to buy higher-priced US-region DVDs. "To every market, the highest possible price that particular market can support," is the cartel mantra. AllofMP3.com was selling to a "universal market", at prices that made it a profit in local (Russian) terms, and that was the real threat to the RIAA's control> and ability to price-fix. Even if AllofMP3.com paid most of its profits to the RIAA, it would still be eroding that control and needed to be destroyed or rendered irrelevant.
Re:Asshats (Score:3, Informative)
The bottom line, in layman's terms, is that it's not easy to break into any established market as an "average Joe", even if Joe is a smart, well-educated and creative individual, or set of individuals. If it were, we wouldn't see commerce in the world largely being driven by global corporations, and corner shop greengrocers would be effectively competing with the Wal-Marts of the world. There's plenty of smarts in the world, but capitalism rewards having lots of money and existing corporate structures far more than "smarts".
Easy - they're almost unknown to the general public. I certainly hadn't heard of them before you mentioned them.
Just to make it even more difficult for them - those in the know enough to know about Magnatunes also probably know about AllOfMp3... having a direct competitor at a quarter of the price (with a really usable service, too) hurts badly.
They pay their artists half of the sale price... do you think that's their mistake? Do you think they should go the allofmp3 route and pay artists nothing, then sell albums for $2.50 each?
AllOfMp3 pay royalties that, under Russian copyright law and the regulations of the non-profit organisations that regulate them (FAIR and ROMS), can be claimed by any relevant copyright owner. The royalties are 15% (see the AllOfMp3 legality FAQ [allofmp3.com], which is an interesting read). We could debate whether 15% is reasonable (even AllOfMp3 admit they are considering paying another 5% directly to the artist), but it's not really fair to say that they pay the artists nothing.
Re:Asshats (Score:3, Informative)
No, it would be like me covering one of their songs for profit. There is compulsory licensing for covers. I can send a tiny check to some PO Box somewhere in the US and I have then paid for the right to cover the song. Now, if I send them $10 and make $1,000,000 off the performance, is that fair? Well, guess what, whether it is fair is irrelevant to whether it is legal. Russia has compulsory licensing on distribution in the same way the US has compulsory licensing for covers. That the RIAA doesn't like it doesn't make it illegal. The law *can't* be illegal. It's the law.