Death to iTunes

Recently saw the poll on how much money people spent on iTunes and decided I'd spread a little Christmas cheer.

Gomusic.ru, or gomusicnow.com, and legalsounds.com, have been a godsend to me and my friends. On the sites, you'll pay less than a dime a song. Legalsounds is $0.09 per with most albums around a buck if you buy the whole thing.

From what I understand, GoMusic started the whole thing. Being a Russian company, they're basically paying the royalties on the songs and nothing else. The United States has tried to put pressure on them and the Russians -- with pretty much a sit-on-it-and-spin response.

There are catches: You can't pay with paypal and you can't buy one song or one album at a time. You have to put $25 in your account and then go from there.

I just got an ipod not that long ago and have been loading up of late. I haven't had any problems with gomusic, but I'm going to try legalsounds just to see how there stuff is. Not that I listen to much Top 40, but they do give away some Top 40 singles just to try and get you to buy the rest of the album.

And as far as Apple is concerned, it couldn't happen to a nicer bunch of people.

 

Steve Jobs will have them all killed.

 

In Russia, you don't kill iTunes. iTunes kill you.

 

The other catch, of course, is that they are totally illegal to use from the U.S., are run by the Russian mob, and don't pay royalties.

They've been shut down repeatedly but pop up again under new names every few months.

There are plenty of ways to steal music without funding the Russian mob.

 

Nice to see that mobsters are evolving with the times, though.

 

Sorry if I don't take your word for it, but with a quick google search it appears that legalmusic has been around since 2008. That isn't getting shut down all the time and popping up as new to me.

Also, there's a ton of them out there: http://www.mp3obsession.com/reviews/ ... I didn't realize that.

At the end of the day, maybe it's because there wasn't message boards back in the day, but I don't remember the outrage when people stole music the old fashioned way: bought a blank tape and made a copy of their friend's or recorded it off the radio.

And if it's so illegal, why hasn't Billboard or Rolling Stones or anybody written any kind of stories about it. I would be more inclined to think that overseas law and such have found some kind of loophole and are exploiting it.

And the day I see P.Diddy and Toby Keith with "Will Sing for Food" signs, I'll go directly to iTunes to make them AND Apple rich again.

 

Yes, and they started with allofmp3.com 10 years ago. It was shut down, and the owners open up new sites all over.

They were written about years ago. It's the Russian mob. As for the legality, it may fit into a gray area in Russian law, but you're not in Russia. If you are using it from the U.S. it is a clear copyright violation. That isn't just my opinion -- it's a legal opinion that got the original shut down, leading to the million splinter sites that make it infinitely harder to fight.

Look, if it's worth it to you to give your credit card information to the Russian mob to save a few cents on a music download, knock yourself out. There's a reason PayPal won't deal with them. Just don't think you've stumbled across a clever secret loophole here.

 

I'm not saying I agree with downloading music via the Russian mob, but if you buy 100 songs at iTunes, that's what, $129 right? And if you go to a Russian mob site that offers the same 100 songs for $0.09 per song, you're spending $9.

That's a difference of $120. That's not a few cents.

 

I finally found something when searching allofmp3, that does in fact state it is illegal.

It also brings up good points that I haven't thought about -- namely youtube.com

the link: http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2010/11/bill-would-nuke-visa-cards-adwords-dns-records-for-pirates.ars

(the second point) A sorry history

They tried to shut down the VCR, going all the way to the Supreme Court in their quest to keep this "Boston Strangler" out of American living rooms. They tried to shut down the MP3 player, going after the early Diamond Rio models. "Diamond's product Rio was destined to undermine the creation of a legitimate digital distribution marketplace," said RIAA head Hilary Rosen in 1998, who wanted the device crippled with DRM. As for the "theft" Joe Biden talked about, TV execs like Jamie Kellner railed agains the "theft" of ad-skipping, and the industry sued to shut down Cablevision's own remote DVR.

The RIAA tried to cripple HD radio, demanding "broadcast flag" tech that would ban certain devices, such as those that might automatically grab only songs by a particular artist. "We're in favor of HD radio," said the RIAA's Mitch Bainwol in a 2004 interview. "It offers great benefits for consumers and everyone involved, but we're not blind to several concerns. Someone could cherry-pick songs off a broadcast and fill up a personal library and then post it on Kazaa… We're concerned for ourselves and the artists. If you don't have protection, it undermines the future investment in music."

Rightsholders went after HDTV, demanding a similar broadcast flag and a mandate that TV makers would have to respect such a flag. They won, only to have it tossed by the courts.

Rightsholders have gone after YouTube, seeking a billion dollars even though the site does take down infringing content when notified about it. A judge recently ruled in favor of YouTube.

The examples could be multiplied, but the point is clear: the big content companies have all sorts of legitimate complaints to make about how their intellectual property is being treated, but they also have a terrifying history of arguing that most hugely useful innovations should be banned or limited as well. It's not hard to see how a regime like the one outlined in COICA could, with a bit of pressure, be brought to bear on all sorts of useful Internet services, and how small overseas sites might have difficulty making their case in a US court.

It's still not clear that COICA has any chance of coming to a vote before this Congress disbands, but it is clear that this is how the music and movie industries would like to proceed. The Senate Judiciary Committee will look at the bill on Thursday.

 

And who among us has stopped watching a video on youtube.com when we realized it wasn't the copyrighted version.

 

None of which has anything to do with the central point:

You are buying music from the Russian mob because it's cheaper than a legal service that pays royalties.

The VCR/YouTube issues raise legal questions about file sharing, not about buying music from the mob. The comparison is to buying bootleg merchandise, not to sharing of music. The mob is selling something it has no right to sell.

 

And lastly, respecting copyright law by the letter of the law, are such things as Moddy's Christmas Mix illegal?

No, he's not selling the mix at $0.09 a song, but he's sharing the music just in a smaller frame than Limewire. (Not that I want him to stop.)

At the end of the day, maybe the courts rule against the record companies. Maybe the record companies have to give away their work, much in the same way our websites give away our work.

And if that happens, then maybe the music companies have to start laying off recording artists. And maybe, then, they lay off Justin Bieber.

If that happens, and I have a small hand in it, I -- not the terrorists -- have won.