prose::commentary::opinion
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After being sued in US federal court last week by the RIAA, AllofMP3 has made clear that it has no intention of buckling under the mounting international pressure. In a statement sent to Ars Technica, the company said, “This suit is unjustified as AllofMP3.com does not operate in New York.
The Internet Archive has received a grant from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation to expand its book-digitizing efforts, which so far have resulted in the scanning of about 100,000 books now available on the group’s Web site.
The RIAA is suing the website AllofMP3.com on behalf of EMI, Sony BMG, Universal Music, and Warner Music in the amount of $150,000 for each of the 11 million songs that were downloaded from June to October of 2006. That comes to a lawsuit totaling $1.65 trillion!
The disinformation campaign continues. Or maybe it’s just clueless frustration on the part of the RIAA and the record companies. After all, if a little bit of litigation failed, maybe a lot of litigation will be successful.
Allofmp3.com is a Russian company operating legally under Russian law. I have no idea what impact suing the company in the United States will have. My guess is that it will have no impact at all, aside from the attendant publicity blitz and the resulting FUD that may discourage consumers in the United States who haven’t yet tried Allofmp3.com from doing so.
An attempt made under Russian law to shut down Allofmp3.com failed. Under current Russian law, the business is operating legally. Detractors also claim that both Mastercard and Visa have stopped processing transactions from Allofmp3.com. I know from first-hand experience and discussions with others that this is bullshit, at least on a practical level. Many people have successfully used Mastercard and Visa to add money to their Allofmp3.com accounts, despite the fact that detractors have claimed that processing has been stopped.
Large corporations have no compunction about taking advantage of global differences in labor and environmental laws to make or save a buck. There is absolutely no reason why we as consumers shouldn’t do the same.
The media companies themselves should be looking at Allofmp3.com and extracting the obvious lesson from it’s success. This obvious lesson is that the Allofmp3.com business model is a piracy buster. Allofmp3.com offers a quality product for less than the opportunity cost of piracy.
I would be willing to bet that if iTunes were to adopt the Allofmp3.com model, sales would go *up*, not down. Because at less than $2.00 an album, or $.25 a song, people will broaden their horizons and buy a greater variety of music than they might have otherwise.
Artists and record companies need to start thinking of downloads as *broadcasting* rather than record sales. These days, Clear Channel Communications has a virtual lock on traditional broadcasting. Why not think of downloads and peer-to-peer sharing as a form of broadcast? Most of today’s recording artists get no traditional airplay at all.
Artists can continue to sell artifacts, too. Let the downloads be loss-leaders. Then sell signed, numbered limited editions on vinyl or in premium packaging to the fanboys, fetishists and collectors, who will be more than happy to pay top dollar for scarce artifacts or early access to new works.
So far, every strategy that the RIAA and the media companies have tried to thwart or shutdown Allofmp3.com has failed. Why not do the artists represented a favor, and start negotiating with ROMS, the Russian royalty management organization, and start collecting the money that the artists are due?