Yes folks the RIAA have taken to running away like a dog with its tail between its legs when in came to providing evidence in a legal case it started. amid much media fanfare.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/05/27/riaa_abandons_ituneski_suit/The Recording Industry Ass. of America has dropped its copyright infringement suit against the Russian online music seller AllofM3.com.
Early last week, as reported by Bloomberg, the RIAA dismissed its 18-month-old suit without explanation, giving up on claims that AllofMP3 illegally sold millions of copyrighted tunes to buyers across the globe.
The RIAA painted the dismissal as a victory for its ongoing copyright crusade. "We dismissed the case against AllofMP3.com because the site is defunct and out of business. That's good news and a positive result," a spokesman told The Reg.
Of course, AllofMP3 was shut down almost a year ago, and the company behind it, Media Services LLC, seems to be open for business at other addresses, including Alltunes.com and MP3sparks.com.
iTuneski's lawyer, John Crossman of the New York firm Zuckerman, Gore, and Brandeis, sees this as a case of RIAA failure. "They tried and failed to get the case off the ground, and now it's over," he told us.
AllofMP3 was closed by the Russian authorities last July, after US President George W. Bush threatened to bar Russia from the World Trade Organization. The AllofMP3 website relaunched little more than a month later, claiming that cut-rate tunes weren't far behind. MP3sparks has picked up much of the slack.
Media Services has always said its stores are perfectly legal because it makes regular copyright payments to the Russian collection society known as ROMS. And a ruling from Judge Yekaterina Sharapova didn't disagree.
I bet poor "Nero" Sherman is hurting over this one, it looks like they wimped out after seeing that trying to undermine Russian sovereignty and specifically a Russian judge who decided there was no legal case to answer was something that would have severely embarrassed the US and opened the flood-gates in a tit-for-tat game that Russia would only have profited from.
