AllofMp3.com interview on p2pnet
AllofMp3.com is a Russia-based company that sells music at a fraction of the cost one would expect to pay from an online store in the United States. How do they save money? Well, in Russia, one apparently does not need the permission of the copyright owners to sell their music. That is what AllofMp3.com claims, at least. Russia’s refusal to respect copyrights is a large point of contention between itself and the United States, and AllofMp3.com is often the main example of legalized piracy in Russia.
An executive at AllofMp3 participated in an interview at p2pnet.net. If you want to read how the anti-IP crowd treats issues like this, read it and see. The article and interview is supposed to be sympathetic to AllofMp3’s side, but I think it’s a great example of the problems with their arguments. On the page you will see paragraph after paragraph of talk about all of the good AllofMp3 does for copyright owners and its legality, there is only one sentence that actually pertains to the issue at hand:
AllofMp3.com:
The Russian Copyright Law provides non-profit Russian Licensing Societies with a right to grant licenses and to collect royalties for the use of music without necessarily obtaining permission from the copyright owners.
Like every other intellectual property debate today, the two sides split depending on their answer to one question: Should a artist be able to own and control what he creates? If the answer is yes, then companies like AllofMp3.com should be shut down. If not, then it really doesn’t matter what the copyright owner wants and any talk of the “benefits” that cheap or free music might bring to copyright owners is irrelevant.
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