News written by Petteri Pyyny (November, 2006)

Russia has bowed under the U.S. pressure and has agreed to investigate the legality of the controversial AllofMP3.com music service.

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.

A lawyer defending Net users that have been sued by the music industry's lobby group, RIAA, claims that the evidence -- or actually the lack of it -- in one of the cases RIAA is pushing in courts, if accepted, would effectively shut down the whole Internet.

The lawyer, Ray Beckerman, tells in an interview on DefectiveByDesign about a real case, Electro vs. Barker, in which, the recording industry, in its complaint, doesn't even bother to "specify any acts or dates or times of copyright infringement as the law normally requires". As the case proceeds in the courts, RIAA has made a statement that merely making files available on the internet is in and of itself a copyright infringement. "It was a shocking argument because if it were accepted it would probably shut down the entire internet", Beckerman says.

MPAA, obviously, has put in a brief supporting the RIAA's case. More interestingly, also the U.S. Government has filed a brief supporting RIAA's side in the case.

Source: DefectiveByDesign

Today, all the major lobby organizations of the recording industry jointly announced that they want to start charging cell phone manufacturers a levy for each cell phone sold that is capable of playing MP3s or other music formats.

Organizations (Kopiosto, Gramex, Teosto and Tuotos) claim that the current situation in Finland, where stand-alone MP3 players, like Apple's iPod, carry a levy upto 15 euros ($19.22), is unfair as the phones that are marketed as "music phones" escape the levy fee.

Considering that world's largest mobile phone manufacturer, Nokia, is a Finnish company (and employs almost 25,000 people in Finland -- a country with a population of just over 5M), it would be interesting to see how this requirement is responded by the consumer electronics lobby organizations who have fought against the extremely draconian levy fee system of Finland for years. Then again, considering how the Finnish government handled the last year's copyright reform, it is quite likely that the recording industry will succeed.

In Finland, labels currently collect levy (a nice word for private taxation) for these items among others:

• blank CDR media - €0.20
• blank DVDR media - upto €1.21 (and yes, the money goes to the record labels not to movie studios..)
• blank VHS cassettes - €1.82 for 4h tape
• portable audio players - upto €15
• digital video players, digital set-top boxes, PVR devices, etc - upto €15

As many of our users probably have already noticed, we launched a fully revamped version of our main home page today. The new front page gives a better idea of the constant flow of various content updates that happen on our site almost 24 hours a day, mixing together the software updates, news articles and game downloads.

Obviously, some people simply prefer to see our news updates on the front page and get annoyed by the fact that they're now mixed together with the other sitewide updates. To accommodate this, we made the small "checkboxes" available at the top of the page to choose what to show and what not to show on the page.

As with most of the recent site improvements, the change of the home page layout was based on the suggestions we've received through our innovation contest. Again, if you have ideas on how to improve our site further, don't hesitate to participate in our innovation contest.

--Team AfterDawn