AllofMP3.com, the Russian mafia’s version of Apple’s iTunes Music Store, is notorious among geeks and immoral music acquirers. I say ‘immoral’ because it’s not yet ‘officially’ clear that buying music from the site is illegal, although the music companies are working hard to get a U.S. court to shut the site down. The recently filed lawsuit caused the N.Y. Times to write an article about the thorny situation. The article provided a wonderful mix of irony and opportunity.
In the old days, the N.Y. Times online edition didn’t provide hyperlinks. Even now, they seem to insert them in a really web-unsavvy way (but, hey, we like the enthusiasm). So, in the article about this shady Russian website what do they do? Yep, they link right to it.
Somewhere in this country record executives in lush office suits are smacking their foreheads, as though in vaudevillian pantomime. Not exactly the kind of publicity they were hoping for. But, meanwhile, several latitude lines over to the right of the globe, furtive figures surrounded by smoke are savoring the moment with awkward, yellow-toothed, grins. "Ah," they say, as they clink their shot glasses, "marketing department? We doan need no stinky marketing department."
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‘You have a multi-billion dollar cartel suing unemployed people, disabled people, housewives, single mothers, home healthcare aids, all kinds of people who have no resources whatsoever to withstand these litigations. And due to the adversary system of justice the RIAA will be successful in rewriting copyright law, if the world at large, and the technological community in particular, don’t fight back and help these people fighting these fights.”
Corporate america want to set morallity in this country they want to outsource our jobs to India and china but we can not buy products from Russia? The hell with em!
We are afraid of Corporate America’s frivolous lawsuits
And this evil campaign of harassment and terror?
Where are the government regulations to protect us from this? Oh wait the goverment is too Big and there are too many regulations already. But none to protect us from them?
Nice one, What do you get for shutting down free sites> Someone else making money because your prices are still too high. What next suing Americans for buying from them?
We so need this to happen:
Concerns about monopoly power in communications and commerce predate the telephone, and we can learn much from history.
“Tim Wu, professor at Columbia Law School and co-author of Who Controls the Internet?, said that concerns about monopoly power and the internet have a long history.
He said that when the telegraph came into operation, it reduced latency from days to hours. At the time, the telegraph was particularly important to newspapers. Western Union, Wu said, gave the Associated Press an exclusive deal to use its network, in return for which the AP agreed to never criticize Western Union or support its competitors.
The effects of this early network discrimination were political as well as economic. “The AP was close to the Republican party of its time, and its strategy was to support the Republican party, which was a different Republican party than today” Wu said.
“The AP did not offer biased news. Instead, it did not offer news about the Democrats for about 20 years….”
Then this:this article Reads:
“There was resistance on Capitol Hill, but broadcast conglomerates argued that more media concentration would actually improve the variety of radio programming. For instance, they claimed, if ABC Radio owned one “classic rock” station in a market, and ABC or, say, Infinity Broadcasting (two prominent rivals at the time), bought the other locally owned classic rock station in the market, there would be little reason for two classic rock stations. “Diversity” became the industry’s buzzword for promoting the bill.”
Then later we learn this we discover this:
‘Every last piece’ destroyed
Adam Candeub, now a law professor at Michigan State University, said senior managers at the agency ordered that “every last piece” of the report be destroyed. “The whole project was just stopped – end of discussion,” he said. Candeub was a lawyer in the FCC’s Media Bureau at the time the report was written and communicated frequently with its authors, he said.
I can’t summon any sympathy for Record Company Executives. Their companies have, for almost a century, defrauded the artists who create their wealth.
The current situation is perhaps a necessary step in dismantling the oligarchy of the recording industry, in order to create a more equitable method of distribution.