Remember AllofMP3.com, the easy to use, consumer-friendly music downloading site based in Russia? It got shut down last July amidst threats that Russia wouldn’t be able to join the World Trade Organization. It’s a long story; read more here and here.
Well, the RIAA brought a copyright infringement lawsuit against AllofMP3.com back in December of 2006, saying that the company made some $30 million per year but didn’t do so legally, even though AllofMP3.com offered to pay music labels based off of Russian copyright laws. Those laws, however, call for far smaller sums of money to be paid out to artists.
AllofMP3.com owner Denis Kvasov also faced up to three years in jail after the site was shut down, but was found innocent of all copyright violations by a Moscow court back in August. The RIAA, now, has finally dropped its lawsuit against AllofMP3.com, as a spokesman told Bloomberg the following,
“The site is now defunct and out of business, the result of a successful anti-piracy initiative.”
An initiative so successful, in fact, that about a month after AllofMP3.com was shut down, MP3Sparks.com popped up — a site run by the same company, where people’s same AllofMP3.com usernames and passwords worked to buy music from the same catalog for the same prices. But good work by the RIAA, at least AllofMP3.com is gone.
via TorrentFreak