It is not illegal in Sweden to link to a torrent file and I never quite understood why linking to something would be the same as actually downloading it. This would in essence mean that selling weapons should be equivalent to killing someone with weapons. Another prime example is the paragraph about allofmp3, the Russian mp3 provider operating perfectly legal in Russia. Forbes sees it this way:

Not every scheme to evade intellectual property laws is so subtle. The music-selling site AllofMP3 uses a simpler business model: Base your company in Russia, steal music from American labels and sell it cheaply.

Again, the service is perfectly legal in Russia. This is actually globalization, something that all companies are so keen of. Only that this time the consumer is profiting from it and not the global companies who sell their goods worldwide, buy cheap labor in poor countries and give a **** about the country that they are based in.

I also find it quite fascinating that Forbes is directly linking to websites of copyright offenders. Isn’t it illegal to do so according to their logic ? (Linking to torrents is illegal but linking to websites that host torrents is not ?)

What’s your take ?

So, the RIAA decided to sue Allofmp3 for the enormous sum of 1.65 trillion dollars. Yes that is right guys, it is not million, nor billion – it is trillion. How did they come up with this amount of money ? They took a look at the sales of allofmp3 and came up with the figure of 11 million mp3 sales in about 6 months. They then decided to multiply this number by 150000 (which is the maximum amount chargeable by law) and came up with the number.

Will the RIAA finally be able to knockout the underdog ? Even if the RIAA wins this case it won’t have an effect on the Russian mp3 site because it would only affect them if they would run their business from the United States. As long as they don’t come stateside they are probably on the safe side.
I personally think that is is ridiculous to demand $150000 for every single song that has been downloaded from the allofmp3 website. The proportions get way out of line here.

According to the Pro Piracy Lobby website the provider experienced some heavy fire from disgruntled customers and privacy & free speech groups. It seems that the pressure on the provider was this intense that they decided to retract their decision and apologize to their customers.

Together with our new chairman of the board, the management agrees that limiting Internet access is not within the framework of our business, says Fredrik Winbladh, President of Perspektiv Bredband.

It is of great importance the we as a telecom and Internet operator, a so called common carrier, focus on delivering information. We can’t risk our position being questioned given the previous statement. The management and the company learned a lot from the debate that took place and we will use this experience to keep developing according to our vision of becoming the prime broadband choice of the Öresund region (Southern Sweden), says new Chairman Mikael Paulsson.

Two interesting statements. It seems that this episode clearly shows that companies will listen to their customers if only enough raise their voice.

I can not recall a court ruling about the legality which should mean that the website itself is legal unless the case would be examined in court. Blocking a perfectly legal website is censorship in my opinion. Where is the difference to countries like China who block websites that express different kind of views about China ? The only difference I see is that this kind of censorship has purely economic reasons while the one in China is politically motivated.

Many European countries have their share of censorship which is not known to many of it’s citizens. Germany and France ban Nazi websites and sites that deny the holocaust and other countries most likely have their share of websites that simply get blocked.
Censorship does not get better if a democratic country uses it to suppress websites because of political or economic reasons. It simply does not feel right.

Why don’t they sue allofmp3 in Russia if they think the service is illegal ? Maybe because they do know that a Russian court would rule that it is a legal service ?

The best thing the big media companies could do would be to offer a similar service on the internet. That would of course mean that high pricing items would come to an end. Suppose they fear that more than to piss of a few more customers criminals.