Allofmp3 Restarts Business 226
An anonymous reader writes "With a pretty short message on their blog, Allofmp3 announced that they will resume their music store soon. According to a Russian court, their music store did not violate any copyright law in Russia, so there was no reason for them to keep it closed."
Legal nuance (Score:5, Funny)
Ha! Silly Russians! In Capitalist America, copyright law violates YOU!
Re:Legal nuance (Score:4, Insightful)
SAFE PORT Part II is probably in the works.
The new U.S. law will probably make it illegal to download music from and site hosted in a country that is not in alignment with U.S. IP laws.
Note: I am very much in favor of IP. I think it is a goodness. However, I also believe that terrorist tactics used by the RIAA are immoral and artists, while upholding their IP rights, should disown and disavow the RIAA.
Re:Legal nuance (Score:5, Insightful)
Why stop at music? Why not all "intellectual property"?
That will in effect make much of the internet "illegal" which would probably be a good thing, because then we will have the choice as to which laws we want to follow. Funny, isn't that how multinational corps work?
Re: (Score:2)
The rights of *all* works should be protected - including those works release for free under public licenses.
Re:Legal nuance (Score:4, Insightful)
Can we stop using the word "terrorism," and its derivatives, to describe any unsavory act? The proper term in this case would be extortion, or perhaps coercive actions. That's not what terrorists do, it's what petty thugs do. When they start storming concert halls with small arms and tear gas, then by all means, let's start calling them terrorists. Until then, can we please keep things in context?
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3)
And lo the beginning of the IP Cold War... (Score:4, Insightful)
Then again it could also just be a case of IP laws not synching up between Russia and elsewhere in the world.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2, Funny)
If you think nuclear war or an invasion of the North Pole is more important than copyright, youre smoking crack.
Re: (Score:2)
Global Economics (Score:2, Funny)
Re:Global Economics (Score:5, Funny)
What, exactly, does this have to do with the defense industry?
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
I wonder if the RIAA has to compensate them... (Score:2)
If you can't beat em', join em' (Score:5, Insightful)
allofmp3 provided/provides:
A great rating/linking system - "People who bought this also bought...","Similar artists..." - Great way to get "the word" out on new music without any advertising costs whatsoever.
Convenience - No DRM, no "special" download app that tied you to Windows (even if just for downloading). (Yes, there was allTunes, but you could always just download using a normal old browser)
Selection - allofmp3's selection was better than any other online music store I've used, except possibly for iTMS, although due to the DRM I haven't touched iTMS since PyMusique/SharpMusique stopped working.
They also happened to have great prices, but I'd happily pay double the prices of what allofmp3 charged.
Rather than try and sue them out of business, the RIAA should instead drive them out of business the capitalist way - with some nice good competition. Offer the same selection, convenience, organization, and interface as allofmp3, and compromise prices between allofmp3's (admittedly too low) and the RIAA's (way too high for "impulse buys" of tracks/albums I'm not sure about.
While the per-track/per-album price of allofmp3 is much lower, many people (myself included) spend MUCH more money in total there because at allofmp3's prices, there is little risk to buying a whole album as an "impulse buy" when you came for just a single track. RIAA pricing encourages single-track purchasing (odd, since the RIAA is so desperate to encourage full-album purchases.)
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
You can price anything right if you choose not to pay your suppliers.
Re:If you can't beat em', join em' (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
Don't get me wrong...the RIAA is evil and needs to die a horrible death. But paying some guy is Russia is even less beneficial to the artist than the RIAA is.
Re:If you can't beat em', join em' (Score:4, Informative)
What would you like them to do, start mailing cheques directly to the artists?
Sources: allofmp3 blog [allofmp3.ru], which links to russian papers.
Re: (Score:2)
But my initial assertion still stands. If you don't have to (for whatever reason) pay the ultimate supplier, you can price anyone else out of business.
The trail of money from 'you' - AllOfMP3.com - ROMS...stops at ROMS.
What would you
Re:If you can't beat em', join em' (Score:5, Insightful)
They are abiding by their laws as written. ROMS is the legal entity to send copyright payments to under Russian law. ROMS is setup to pay the appropriate copyright royalties to the proper owner(s) when officially notified by the proper owner(s). The check then goes in the mail (and future payments go in the mail as they arrive). They simply have a system in place to make sure the proper owner of the copyright is compensated, and not someone with the false claim to the copyright, and this is in accordance to LAW. Stop complaining that you don't like it. I don't like the fact that women in Saudi Arabia need to keep their heads covered, but that is the law in that country. Same thing with no being able to chew bubble gum in Singapore...
Re: (Score:2)
One guy tells another guy "Give me a dollar, and I'll give you permission to sell some other persons stuff. He did not tell me directly that this was OK, but that's too bad for him. This is within 'our' laws, so don't worry."
And to the artists/RIAA/whoever:
"We're going to distribute your works. Here is the deal we'll give you. If you don't like this particular amount, tough. We'll distribute
Re:If you can't beat em', join em' (Score:4, Interesting)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re:If you can't beat em', join em' (Score:5, Informative)
Both US law and Russian law grant a statutory license for any company to send absolutely any music over the internet, both US law and Russian law say that music may be sent in any format (including MP3), both US law and Russian law grant permission to do so without the permission of the copyright holder - or even to do so against the express dis-permission to do so from a copyright holder, both US law and Russian law designate a national collective body to receive the payments and to distribute those payments to the copyright holders, both US law and Russian law dictate what those royalty rates will be.
For example Pandora.com is a US company operating under that largely identical law and sending MP3s to people perfectly legally.
So what *is* the difference between US law and Russian law? Well there are basically two significant differences. US law has a couple of restrictions trying to prevent it from looking like a "store". If someone requests a specific song, you must wait at least an hour before sending it. You can't announce what music you are going to send. You can't send more than three songs from the same artist or two songs from the same album within any given hour. Probably one or two other quirky rules. But largely it boils down to that first rule - if someone wants to in effect "buy" a specific song download you have to wait at least an hour before initiating the transfer. Oh, and US law says the company can't *TELL* you that they sent you a download. Yeah, the good old "lets close our eyes real hard and pretend the facts of reality don't exist and maybe they will go away". Pandora.com "looks" like a "streaming" radio, and they don't *tell* you they sent you a 128kbps MP3 file download. But they did. If you take a look in your system temp folder, all the MP3 files are sitting there. They are named "Access-1" and "Access-2" etc, and they have no file extension. You just rename the file and tack on the
Oh wait.... I almost forgot. I said there were basically TWO differences between US law and Russian law! It wouldn't be very fair at all for me write that rather long paragraph on the first difference and then quietly exit without telling what that second significant difference is, now would it?
Well the other difference is the different royalty rates. Yeah, I guess I have to admit that is a pretty important difference. Not just an important difference, but a LARGE difference. In fact it works out to about twenty times difference in royalty rate. Yeah, a twenty time difference in money for the artists isn't even even in the same ballpark. Russian law and US law don't set anywhere near the same payments for artists.
Oh wait... I think I might have been a bit unclear there on the difference between US law and Russian law, and particularly about those royalty rates. It's Russian that sets a twenty times higher payment rate for artists, and it is US law that sets twenty times lower payment rate for artists. Sorry if maybe you got the impression it was the other way around
Re: (Score:2)
Could you give some sources for the 20x difference in royalty rates between the USA (SoundExchange?) and Russia (ROMS)? It would make excellent cannon fodder for future arguments on this subject, but a quick search turned up nothing.
As an interesting side, and more relevant to this article, what are the royalty rates of Europe (IFPI)?
This information seems fairly hard to come by, as searching for any of the
Re: (Score:2)
Thanks.
Re: (Score:2)
Really? That's how it appears to you? I mean, we can interpret these current events in various different ways, but given the historic track record of Russian government workers, yours is one interpretation that never even crossed my mind.
Re: (Score:2)
So while they may not have had to pay the 'ultimate supplier', they still had to pay.
On the other hand, I believe the amounts they were paying were less than if they'd been in the US. So in that sense you are correct... They had lower costs and competition would be ineffective. (I believe this
Re: (Score:2)
ROMS is backed by the sovereignty of the Russian Government. The only influence IFPI could have to get royalties is the influence the Russian Government, as a sovereign nation, allows it to have. Therefore, it's not in IFPI's power to decide what royalties it wants; it either takes what ROMS offers or it can go pound sand.
IFPI should be happy; Russia would be perfectly wi
Re: (Score:2)
Sure. Why not?
Yeah that would be great. But yeah, there's a "why not".
The RIAA contracts prohibit artists from accepting the money directly. Those contracts also assign ownership of the copyright to the RIAA companies, making it almost impossible for Russian law to properly and cleanly permit the money to be directly assigned to the artists, especially considering that the "artist" of any given work often consists of a group o
Re: (Score:2)
They should also escrow all the money destined for artists that they can't verify or contact.
Re: (Score:2)
Re:If you can't beat em', join em' (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:If you can't beat em', join em' (Score:5, Insightful)
Despite the high prices for the consumer, the supplier (artist) gets almost nothing.
Current track prices are way too high ($1.30 for usable content with an incredibly limited selection), and while allofmp3's were too low (10-25 cents/track depending on length and compression), a compromise somewhere between the two (maybe 50 cents for no-DRM) would likely be quite successful.
They could even reduce advertising budgets significantly and simply use the "similar artists" and "people also bought x" features that most good online stores have nowadays.
Re: (Score:2)
Re:If you can't beat em', join em' (Score:5, Insightful)
(Part of this post was recycled from this one [slashdot.org])
Re: (Score:2)
If I were King Of The World, my first guesstimate at low price while getting good money to artists would be 15 cents per file plus 1.5-2 cents per meg, hopefully getting halfish to the artist? That puts a basic MP3 at a quarterish and your FLAC album at $8-$10ish. And I th
Re:If you can't beat em', join em' (Score:5, Informative)
http://blogs.allofmp3.ru/music_news/2007/08/27/if
Re: (Score:2)
Don't be daft. It's more like you come into my store and offer me $0.01 for a case of beer, and I refuse, and you walk out of the store with the beer anyway.
You can't just name your own terms/price, and only if the seller accepts payment is a sale consummated. Conversely, the RIAA would have a rather hard time going after allofMP3 for copyright infringement if they we
Re:If you can't beat em', join em' (Score:5, Informative)
No, it's more like he walks into your store and offers you $0.01 for a case of beer, you refuse, a passing police officer reminds you that the $0.01/case price is fixed by law and declared to be fair , and he walks out of the store with the beer.
AllOfMP3 didn't! The Russian government named its price, and AllOfMP3 complied.
...and that's exactly the way it should be, since AllOfMP3 wasn't committing it, according to Russian law -- which, incidentally, is the only law that matters in this discussion, whether you like it or not!
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Actually I'd gladly support increasing the Russian royalty rate and massively increasing the US royalty rate to match, if we also eliminated a few defect-by-design
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Yes. Because it's always good when U.S. law doesn't apply.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/19638526/site/newsweek / [msn.com]
Re: (Score:2)
By using them, you're essentially paying to silence your conscience
Deal!
Though in all honesty, I buy from them, not to silence my conscience, but rather because it is safer (legally and malware wise) than P2P and vastly more usable than iTunes (seeing as all but one of my music players are !iPods).
What's more, I've bought nearly my entire library from them because it was cheaper for me to trade money than time. I have >500 CDs and I estimate that ripping and cataloging the library would have taken me about 100 hours of my time. In 100 hours I make more money after ta
Re: (Score:2)
Well doh. When you're hiding behind a statutory license and can sell whatever you want whether the copyright holder likes it or not, of course you got perfect selection.
You've also killed the ability to control where your goods are sold. The bad analogy aside, would you like it if Wal-Mart had a statutory license to sell goods, whether the producer liked it or not? Oh yeah and at a fixed, extremely low cost to Wal-Mart to
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Altho I suppose allofmp3 is good if you just want to be cheap.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
"Maybe finally the RIAA will realize that allofmp3's pricing scheme and business model works and proves that if you price it right and don't use DRM, people will readily pay for music even if it is available for free on P2P."
Laws would have to change here first. Although the record companies have ways to get around it, statutory royalties are $0.08 per track each for the songwriter and lyricist. This wouldn't go over well with the "the artists don't get enough money" crowd, as adopting Russian-style pri
Re: (Score:2)
Really? They've only been losing money from that? Not from their heavy handed tactics driving people away from buying CDs?
I haven't bought a CD in years because of the RIAA. It's *entertainment*. It's not air. I won't die without it. I actually enjoy driving with the radio off now.
Re: (Score:2)
"Really? They've only been losing money from that? Not from their heavy handed tactics driving people away from buying CDs?"
If you read Slashdot long enough I can see how you'd make that assumption, so I understand where your question is coming from. But it's not correct. There are certainly fringe folks who are boycotting the music industry, but as a whole, consumers are buying as much music as ever. For instance, iTunes' growth is still accelerating. Around here folks like to state that the business m
Re: (Score:2)
Untrue, the record companies are posting losses because their products can be copied verbatim ad infinitum and sold in a flea markets all over the world for one tenth the price.
You know, the true irony here... (Score:2)
Meanwhile, the CRB and SoundExchange form an *identical* arrangement, yet people on Slashdot bitch and complain about how unjust this system is. Funny, that...
(BTW, that's not to say the new rates the CRB is proposing are anyth
Re: (Score:2)
I can understand buying music from a store - you get the real kosher copy, and you support the artist.
I can understand getting your music for free, through a P2P setup. It's free. Duh.
I can't understand paying for someone to pirate stuff for you. It seems like the worst of both worlds - you lose money AND you don't get that clean feeling from paying le
Re: (Score:2)
How about:
1) Being shielded from a potential RIAA lawsuit.
2) Still screwing over said RIAA.
3) The convenience of not having to troll P2P networks.
4) Higher quality and selection among what is easy for you to find on P2P.
Number 4 is the most likely reason I would consider paying a small fee, but I'm just guessing on that one, since I don't know first hand if the provide quality and selection. I'd bet the iTunes crowd makes a lot of their purchase
Re: (Score:2)
But why sell your music for $0.10 per track without DRM if you can sell it for $0.99 per track with DRM? Last I checked, iTunes Music Store was still going strong, and they're doing exactly the latter.
As a side note, the whole music downloading circus nicely illustrates the machinatio
Never stopped doing business... (Score:5, Interesting)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re:So, you're essentially paying a pirate money, h (Score:5, Informative)
So what he is doing here is supporting an organization which is battling the influence exerted by the RIAA while legally distributing DRM free music.
Admittedly, there is a question of whether the amounts involved adequately compensate artists but, honestly, is not virtually any system better than what the RIAA promotes.
]{
Re: (Score:2)
The big problem is that the amount paid to ROMS is incredibly small and has not been negotiated with the rights holders or artists. The standard US mechanical copyright rate paid to an *artist* (not the record label) is 9.1 cents per song, or 1.75 cents per minute (whichever is more). Allofmp3.com is able to sell content for less because they're ripping their content from commercial CDs (if you're lucky) and not paying the guys and girls who worked their butts off to make it.
The "we pay royalties to ROMS"
Re: (Score:2)
"... but the cold reality is that most moderately successful recording artists find it incredibly hard to earn a decent living in a fickle and competitive industry..." >> even for selling legal CD's in music stores.
At least here in Brazil, artists used to say they only earn real money by doing shows and tours across the country/world.
Re:So, you're essentially paying a pirate money, h (Score:4, Interesting)
Well that's an amusing argument, considering that the US *ALSO* has a statutory licensing law and that rate has also not been been negotiated with the rights holders or artists.
Oh wait, I forgot to echo back to you the the part about the amount paid being incredibly small. Oops, my bad. Well lets see, the royalty rate under US law for a company sending the identical MP3 file to someone, compared to the Russian rate is... accrding to my calculator.... hmmm lets see line up the decimal point there....
Ah there we go! It's a multiplier of about TWENTY difference in royalty rate!
WOW! That's a frigin huge difference in royalty rate!
Under Russian law AllOfMP3.com has to pay TWENTY TIMES MORE in royalty rate than Pandora.com had to pay in royalty rate under US law when they sent me the exact same MP3 file. Yep, that's right, the Russian royalty rate is vastly higher than the US royalty rate.
You are absolutely welcome to say that Russian royalty rates should be higher, but you cannot argue that there is anything wrong or illegitimate about the principle or general operation of that law. In legal principle and in fundamental aspects the Russian law is effectively identical to US law. There are differences in some details, but absolutely not in anything altering the basic legitamacy of that law.
Russian law is absolutely legitimate
The "we pay royalties to ROMS" claim is a smokescreen to hide the fact that allofmp3.com is not paying enough money to the creators to actually sustain their work.
Two points. First of all the RIAA refusing to accept the money and refusing to pass that money on to their artists... and prohibiting their artists from directly collecting their money themselves is a public relations and political ploy. It is a small price to pay for the wonderful chant that RIAA artists are not getting paid at all, and to back up their bogus claim that the law itself is illegitimate.
Secondly, I would fully welcome increasing the royalty rate in Russian law. It is fundamentally a legitamate and GOOD law, and yes it should direct more money to the artists. And the US law royalty should also be massivly increased to match the Russian rate... provided that some defective-by-design arbitrary clauses in US law were removed to match Russian law... for example the US law prohibits sending more than three songs from a single artist or more than two songs from a single album within a single hour. Crank up the royalty rates to pay artists more and get rid of the (US) arbitrary restrictions on the timing of sending songs.
Of course that is the LAST thing the RIAA wants. They don't care squat about how well their artists get paid. And in fact they aren't particularly thinking about what rate they are getting paid on it either. What they are in a frenzy over is that fact that the broader market effect would be to more open opportunities to INDIE musicians. The RIAA's very existence is founded upon artists *NEEDING* to sign their soul away in an RIAA Label contract. If new artists find a broader marketplace more conducive to indie survival, the RIAA's influx of new lifeblood starts drying up. It doesn't matter what royalty rate the RIAA picks up in the short term if they lose control and indie artists are no longer forced to sign up with the RIAA middleman.
A good statutory license means that the RIAA (and their artists) get paid their due, but that the RIAA lose their VETO power to shut down any music enterprise at will, lose the power to extort other companies into compliance.
It's easy to dismiss the rights holders as "a bunch of rich musicians" who aren't earning a few extra million
Actually I'm thinking more in terms of "lots of the poor musicians should be making more tens of thousands each... a living wage.
An indie artist could be reasonably pleas
Re: (Score:2)
Domain blocked in Denmark (Score:5, Informative)
For a moment I thought it's no longer the net I grew up with.
As I wasn't particularly interested in finding the ringtone or going to AllOfMP3 anyway thought I'd alleviate my boredom by investigating how they'd done this. Turns out they've only poisoned their DNS. So if you get the correct IP address from somewhere else and stick it in your hosts file you can work around it.
So the net returned back to normal: identified censorship as an error and routed 'round it.
Whew!
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2, Informative)
It provides a dns server that does some filtering such as blocking malicious websites and can spelling in urls. If this is a good thing is up to you.
Re: (Score:2)
Don't feed the trolls! (Score:3, Informative)
So suggest you try any of Cybercity, Tele2, Telia, and TDC and thereby determine the validity of the original post for yourself.
There again, if I wasn't so bored I wouldn't have wasted the time doing the rounds of checking the various ISPs myself and replying.
Not very many comments here yet... (Score:5, Funny)
Allofmp3 sells your email address to spammers (Score:2, Interesting)
I give each company I deal with a different email address so I know when they have sold my address to spammers. Shortly after allofmp3.com was being shut down for the first time, I started getting spam to the email address that I had given to allofmp3.com. Remember, that address was never given to anyone except allofmp3.com.
I guess they figured if they can't make money selling music that they don't have any rights to, then the would supplement their income by selling out their customers' email addresses t
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Many big, 'reputable', American companies will sell your email address as well as your physical address to make money. This is not unique.
]{
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
corporations taste of it's own medicine? (Score:4, Insightful)
But when another company takes advantages of its laws and it effects the company here. Oh noes!
Re: (Score:2)
WTO (Score:3, Insightful)
In the end, this could pretty much negate all that W. tried to accomplish during his 8 years. That is the large American companies keep their copyrights under draconian conditions, and receive large royalties.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Yeah, Clinton wasn't so great either. But you can't put all the blame on him for the D
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
And what does it matter if it requires Congress? Up until 2006, Congress was firmly in control by the Republicans; they had majorities in both houses. And they had a Republican in the White House. So they could do anything they wanted. During that time, the Republicans were all firmly in lock-step with Bush too; it's only recently that so many have been trying to distance themselves from him. If Bush had taken a stand and insisted on Congress passing a law to repeal Clinto
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
The problem is that every time someone complains about the DMCA, and Bush's name is mentioned, some neocon astroturfer springs up and says "Clinton signed that law, so it's Clinton's fault!". Sorry, no. It was only Clinton's fault until he left office. There's been plenty of time to fix the error since then, and no action whatsoever has occurred. This is obviously because the Bush administration has no interest in fixing the
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
I didn't "blame" Clinton, but you cannot hold him blameless. Nor did I excuse anything Bush or any republican has done. But, in standing in the middle, I see a lot more pot-shots coming from the left than I do the right, and this was one of them.
Re: (Score:2)
As a libertarian, I blame both. But more of the blame goes to Bush, for failing to help the situation in any way, since it was during his reign that the reasons why the DMCA was so bad became so obvious. We didn't have stupid stuff like illegal source code, illegal research into encryption, or encryption-protected printer ink cartridges before he came into power. He and his cohorts (cronies?) in Congress had
Re: (Score:2)
In what sense? They are *not* a WTO member (yet). They have an accession status, that has not changed much in the past few years. Take a look at http://www.wto.org/english/thewto_e/acc_e/a1_russ
Re: (Score:2)
Violating Russian copyright law is very difficult (Score:2, Funny)
Re:Violating Russian copyright law is very difficu (Score:2)
No one is punching any artist in the mouth. We are punching the labels in the mouth.
Artists make money on performances, live performances, as that is the last bastion of revenue that the labels can't steal via their accountants.
Let a m
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)