RIAA abandons iTuneski suit
Mistakes failure for victory
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The Recording Industry Ass. of America has dropped its copyright infringement suit against the Russian online music seller AllofM3.com - aka iTuneski.
Early last week, as reported by Bloomberg, the RIAA dismissed its 18-month-old suit without explanation, giving up on claims that AllofMP3 illegally sold millions of copyrighted tunes to buyers across the globe.
The RIAA painted the dismissal as a victory for its ongoing copyright crusade. "We dismissed the case against AllofMP3.com because the site is defunct and out of business. That's good news and a positive result," a spokesman told The Reg.
Of course, AllofMP3 was shut down almost a year ago, and the company behind it, Media Services LLC, seems to be open for business at other addresses, including Alltunes.com and MP3sparks.com.
iTuneski's lawyer, John Crossman of the New York firm Zuckerman, Gore, and Brandeis, sees this as a case of RIAA failure. "They tried and failed to get the case off the ground, and now it's over," he told us.
AllofMP3 was closed by the Russian authorities last July, after US President George W. Bush threatened to bar Russia from the World Trade Organization. The AllofMP3 website relaunched little more than a month later, claiming that cut-rate tunes weren't far behind. But as of today, those tunes have yet to reappear.
MP3sparks has picked up much of the slack - though the RIAA likes to point out that it can't process US credit cards. Early last year, Mastercard and Visa joined the fight against alleged MP3 piracy in the former Soviet Union.
The RIAA also told us that "the Russian government still needs to hold accountable with criminal prosecution those who were behind" AllofMP3. But that's been tried before. Last year, a trio of big-name Western music labels convinced the Russian courts to prosecute the site's onetime owner, Denis Kvasov, and the courts sided with Kvasov.
Media Services has always said its stores are perfectly legal because it makes regular copyright payments to the Russian collection society known as ROMS. And a ruling from Judge Yekaterina Sharapova didn't disagree.
We wouldn't be surprised if iTuneski rides again. ®
COMMENTS
Free lunch for everybody! YAY!
"Music should be free for personal use and that is that."
And why is that? I guess you are not a musician. What is it that you do for a living? What if I say whatever it is *you* do for a living should be free for personal use? Are you willing to work for my personal use enjoyment even if I don't pay you, every time, all the time?
What kind of logic is this anyway? Why not demand that bakery products should be free for personal use. Everybody should just be able to walk into a bakery, pick anything they like for personal consumption and not pay for it, how about that?
Why stop there then? Why not demand that all food items should be free for personal consumption? Why not demand that electricity, gas and water should be free for personal consumption? Why not demand that anything you fancy in any shop should be yours for free as long as it is for personal use?
What is it about musicians that they should give their work away to everyone without getting paid? So what if the world of commerce doesn't pick up the bill for the rest of us and musicians go out of business, what if then nobody wants to become a musician anymore? I guess we'll all be listening to computer generated music played by computers. If that is your thing, fine. I personally prefer music made by real people, played by real people, and if I like the music I am willing to pay for it, personal use or otherwise, not because I am politically correct but simply because I know that if I don't pay, and everybody else also doesn't pay, then the music will stop coming, eventually.
Politically correct???
What has abiding by the law to stay out of jail to do with political correctness?
If I tell you "Better not do crime X because you can go to jail if you do" and you then ignore my advice and end up in court facing a jail sentence, will you argue with the court that I was only politically correct when I told you not to do the crime? Will that help you stay out of jail? No it won't. The only thing that will matter then is whether or not you did the crime. Political correctness has as much to do with this as a sack of rice somewhere in a warehouse in China has to do with your presumably low IQ.
@ NOT illegal
You are either a troll or you are a fool.
Just because something is available on the internet doesn't mean it is *legally* available. You may not like the law the way it is, but that doesn't make the law go away. You may not abide by the law the way it is, but that doesn't make it legal. The ONLY WAY to legalise something illegal is to have the parliament change the law.
Until that happens, downloading files, be it music, videos, photos, software or text documents, is NOT legal UNLESS the copyright has either expired (50-70 years after the death of the author) or the holder of the intellectual property in the file EXPLICITLY gave permission for the file to be made available in this way. If the rights have not yet expired and you do not have such permission by the holder of the copyright then it is not legal to copy it. Period.
No amount of trolling nor lamenting by fools ignorant of the law will change this fact.
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