Bye Bye Allofmp3!
Allofmp3.com, one of the internet’s biggest sources of illegal music, has finally been shut down. Another site that operates in the same way by the same company in Russia has sprung up to replace it, but the fact that something finally happened to Allofmp3.com is still good news.
For anybody who doesn’t know what this site is about, Allofmp3.com was a Russian website that sold songs for pennies compared to the prices offered by services like iTunes or Napster. Despite protests from music labels and artists that Allofmp3.com was taking their property, Allofmp3.com claimed that it was selling music legitimately under Russian law. Russia does not respect intellectual property rights, so I don’t necessarily doubt that Allofmp3.com’s claims were true. Still, they were selling other people’s music without permission. If Russia is ever going to be taken seriously as a country worth trading with, sites like Allofmp3.com can’t be permitted.
I see similarities between the allofmp3.com issue and the internet radio royalty rate issue we have in the US. I read allofmp3.com’s legal argument (since the site is now down I can’t reference it), and if I remember correctly they claimed that Russian law allows other organizations to set and collect rates for music, with or without the permission of the individual who owns the music. The owner of the music can contact the organization and get the money from the sale, but the owner does not have the ability to make the organization stop selling his or her music.
Sound familiar? It’s a compulsory license, like the one in the US that allows webcasters to broadcast other people’s music without their permission for rates that the owner never set. Now, there are differences between these two cases. The save-net-radio advocates want to broadcast music, while allofmp3.com sells music. And unlike the save-net-radio advocates, allofmp3.com sells music at rates that practically constitute giving it away. If one were to measure the extent at which both sides want to violate someone’s intellectual property rights, allofmp3.com would blow the save-net-radio people out of the water. However, the fundamental idea behind the two are the same. Both want to use someone’s intellectual property without obtaining permission, and both want to use the government to do it.
Tags: [allofmp3, internet radio]Comments
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.
Tags: [allofmp3, intellectual property]