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AllofMP3.com, a digital music warehouse akin to iTunes, has ruffled the feathers of industry recording groups by selling albums at a cut rate, seemingly bypassing industry-standard repayment and copy protection schemes. To add insult to injury, pressure from the recording industry to shut the company down has fallen on deaf ears.Those ears, belonging to Russian prosecutors, are deaf to the noise produced by recording companies because Russian copyright law may not cover “digital media.” And if the RIAA can’t shut the site down, AllofMP3 poses a more dangerous threat: outperforming accredited mp3 vendors in the marketplaceBeyond threatening the RIAA’s authority in the states AllofMP3 also has the potential of threatening iTunes’ hegemony in the marketplace. Because, from a consumer’s perspective, it’s better.“High prices, limited inventory and restrictions on the files are not the way to compete with free.”And if competing with free is out of the question, it seems that the RIAA will have to learn how to compete with $1.14.
Delegations from the 148 WTO countries will gather in Hong Kong on Tuesday to thrash out global trade rules, but on the sidelines Russia —the biggest economy still not a member — will be locked in talks on its entry to the trade club. The United States is one of a handful of countries left whose approval Russia needs if it is to join, and one of three big issues stalling the two countries’ talks is the widespread piracy in Russia of US-made films, music and software. On a shelf in a Moscow shop is evidence of the problem: a DVD of Warner Bros Pictures’ latest blockbuster featuring the boy wizard, “Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire".
Russia’s top prosecutor has called for legalizing file sharing in the Internet, hoping that the move would help combat piracy, Prime-Tass reported on Tuesday. “A threat to intellectual property rights in the Internet remains underestimated.” Deputy Prosecutor General, Vladimir Kolesnikov, told the lower house of the Russian parliament, the State Duma. “Establishing legal websites could help decrease piracy on the web,” he said.
A coalition of U.S. trade associations representing copyright-based industries has called on the U.S. government to recognize serious copyright violations in Russia and to designate the country for possible sanctions. The IIPA is recommending that Russia be named a Priority Foreign Country, a designation reserved for countries that are judged to have the most onerous and egregious acts, policies, and practices that have the greatest adverse impact on U.S. products and to not be engaged in good faith negotiations or making significant progress in negotiations to address these problems. "Russia's copyright piracy problem remains one of the world's most serious," the IIPA said in its submission. Citing piracy rates of 85 percent for business software, 67 percent for records and music, 81 percent for motion pictures and 82 percent for entertainment software, the IIPA said repeated efforts by the U.S. government in these areas has yielded little progress. It also said Russia is home to "some of the world's most open and notorious Web sites selling unauthorized materials" and offered as an example the www.allofmp3.com Web site, which sells MP3 files of popular music for a few cents per song. Ahead of the USTR's report last year the IIPA also recommended Russia be named a Priority Foreign Country. However, only Ukraine was on the list when the report was published in April. Ukraine has been at that level for some years. It had some trade benefits withdrawn in August 2001 and in January 2002 the U.S. imposed $75 million worth of sanctions on Ukrainian imports. The IIPA's recommendation calls for Russia to lose similar benefits. The IIPA said Ukraine this time deserves to be placed with 15 other countries on the Priority Watch List, which is the second highest rank. The other countries are Argentina, Chile, China, Colombia, Costa Rica, the Dominican Republic, Egypt, India, Indonesia, Israel, Lebanon, the Philippines, Thailand, Turkey and Venezuela.
Russia’s chances of joining the World Trade Organization in 2006 will fade if the government pushes ahead with new legislation on intellectual property rights, industry groups and anti-piracy campaigners warned on Tuesday, March 7, saying the proposed laws were flawed.The draft bill, which would replace all existing legal safeguards, is riddled with holes and would likely increase international property theft, said the Coalition for Intellectual Property Rights, an organization active in the former Soviet Union made up of trademark, patent and brand owners and other groups.As MosNews has reported on numerous occasions, Russia has brought its intellectual property laws largely in line with international norms, but enforcement remains weak despite widely publicized police raids on factories where pirated DVDs, CDs and software are made. The issue of intellectual property rights is one of the main issues on which Russia’s WTO membership negotiations with the United States had stumbled. U.S. companies have said that pirated films, music and software in Russia have cost them nearly $1.8 billion in 2005 alone. The International Intellectual Property Alliance even urged the U.S. administration to suspend trade benefits to Russia over the piracy issue.
The US movie industry is urging Russia to crack down on piracy to aid the revival of its own business. The Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) said both US and Russian films lost money due to the illegal trade in the country. "I believe that the politicians in Russia need to make this a much higher priority," said MPAA chief executive Dan Glickman on a visit to Moscow. Russian film-makers joined the MPAA's call for a crackdown. Russian economy minister German Gref, US ambassador to Moscow William Burns and industry leaders also attend the meeting. Mr Glickman estimated Russian piracy cost the US $266m (£253m) a year while non-US films lost $122m (£70,000).
Russia should shut down a pirate music Web site that is robbing U.S. recording companies of sales if it wants to become a member of the World Trade Organization, the top U.S. trade official said on Wednesday. "I have a hard time imagining Russia becoming a member of the WTO and having a Web site like that up and running that is so clearly a violation of everyone's intellectual property rights," U.S. Trade Representative Susan Schwab told reporters after a speech to a services industry organization.Schwab's call for the allofmp3.com Web site to be closed came as the United States and Russia are trying once again to reach a deal on Moscow's 13-year-old bid to join the WTO.
