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Up to the minute notes on the current state of free thinking and free living: Kentucky moonshine - original analysis and reporting from MoreThings, and all round pop culture museum of sight and sound - photo galleries, mp3 and video downloads.
Al Barger and MoreThings - getting people's goats since 1998.
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December 21, 2006
Copyright Competition
US record companies have filed a big ol' hairy lawsuit against the Russian-based mp3 download service AllofMP3 in an American court.
From the AP:Several major record labels sued the operator of the Russian music Web site AllofMP3.com on Wednesday, claiming the company has been profiting by selling copies of music without their permission.
The lawsuit was filed in federal court in New York against Moscow-based Mediaservices, which owns AllofMP3 and another music site, allTunes.com.
A slate of major record labels, including Arista Records LLC, Warner Bros. Records Inc., Capitol Records Inc. and UMG Recordings Inc., are behind the lawsuit.
The labels claim Mediaservices' sites sell millions of songs by their artists without paying them "a dime" for the right to do so.
"Defendant's entire business ... amounts to nothing more than a massive infringement of plaintiffs' exclusive rights under the Copyright Act and New York law," according to the lawsuit.
This really doesn't seem to have legal merit though, just on the basis of jurisdiction. AllofMP3 is a Russian website, so American laws don't apply, any more than it would make sense for some cleric to sue Warner Brothers music in a Pakistan court for putting out Madonna records in violation of local sharia law. You can understand the American companies WANTING to shut down this site if they're not getting paid, but American laws just don't apply in other countries.
That's a good thing, too. Given the global nature of the internet, this will be one little check around the edges for the political bullying of American media companies. Disney et al have so thoroughly bought off American politicians that modern copyright law looks much more like cartel extortion or corporate welfare than anything designed simply "to promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries."
Thus, competing national legal jurisdictions to something widely accessible through the internet makes for a bit of de facto checks and balances on the abuses of US domestic politics. It's just a lot more difficult for Disney to control not just US law, but Chinese, Russian, and every other kind. They still have influence, but it's more indirect, largely in the form of getting the US government to lean on foreign governments to lean on their people. Now, how much does influence does MPAA and RIAA money get them with the US government to push their private profit interests with foreign governments vs all the obviously much more important issues of war and peace?
Plus, American publishers have other ways to legitimately press their interests. For example, they have convinced Visa and MasterCard to quit accepting payments for the Russian mp3 sites. That alone won't shut them down, but it makes their lives more difficult. It's one more hoop that American consumers will have to jump through to utilize the service, finding other ways to make payments.
Meantime, the more American media companies find themselves unable to completely extort consumers for old movies and music that no one alive had anything to do with creating, the more they will find themselves having to actually try to provide good value if they want to make a buck. They could probably get people to readily pay them twice as much as the super cheap prices of the Russian pirates, cause it's all legal and orderly and easier - you can pay with your Visa. But as you get to four or five times more expensive, more and more American consumers around the edges get motivated to jump through an extra hoop or two to save the money.
The purely technical difficulty of copyright owners inability to actually enforce their legal monopolies against peer-to-peer networks even domestically similarly provides competition around the edges. People will pay more than free to get stuff legally, conveniently and with better quality- but most haven't been willing to cough up $1 a song and more for simple downloads- or for limited downloads locked down with DRM copy controls screwing up their usability. The cheaper and less controlled the RIAA members make their legitimate legal products, the less motivated fans will be to circumvent them.
posted by Al at 12/21/2006 03:17:00 PM
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