As Russia signed an agreement with the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative, in order to get an entry to the World Trade Organization, it has agreed to take action against digital piracy. U.S. Trade Representative has issued a press release stating that Russia will "investigate and prosecute companies that illegally distribute copyright works on the Internet". So, this incldues AllfMP3.com and other similar services that operate in Russia.
The problem is, however, that AllofMP3 is a legal service under the current Russian copyright legislation. The company sells music over the Net for extremely cheap price, without DRM hassle and allows customers to freely choose the audio compression method and quality they wish to have their music encoded with. As a summary, the site works exactly like a good legal online distribution channel should work, in order to fight against P2P networks. The problem, U.S. government and the lobby groups behind its demands, has with AllofMP3 and other similar services is that the royalties the companies pay to labels, are minimal or non-existent -- but still in line with the current Russian legislation.
AllofMP3 has been under a heavy international pressure lately, in Denmark an ISP was forced to close access to its site, last year German court ordered all German sites advertising or linking to AllofMP3 to cease their activity and in October this year, Visa stopped accepting payments made to AllofMP3.
It is interesting to see whether these companies will simply move their operations overseas (one would assume there are still ex-Soviet states left that have copyright legislations similar to the current Russian legislation) or would they try to accommodate to the new situation in Russia (where the legislation will inevitably change soon to satisfy U.S. -based labels' demands).
Source: CNet
Written by: Petteri Pyyny @ 29 Nov 2006 23:01
