Quote:
Originally Posted by Kemp
I can strongly recommend, however, back on the subject of music, [deleted] They have some very low prices (around $1.30 per album), and it is quite legal. I believe they have a 6-month window for downloading/redownloading, but there is no DRM, and it's easy enough to download 4 gigs of music and back it up on a DVD-R.
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"Quite legal" may be overstating the case.
A whois lookup on the domain places them in Cyprus. The actual servers may be hosted elsewhere.
The site says "The activity of site [deleted] is carried out according to to the legislation of the license agreement N57/03F-10 of the Rightholders Federation for Collective Copyright Management of Works Used Interactively (NP "FAIR"). Service [deleted] pays full-scale author's royalties to owners of pieces of music, trade marks, names, slogans and other copyright objects used on the site."
NP "FAIR" is a Russian organization intended to comply with applicable Russian laws. See
http://simb.biz/index_eng.php.frame=...del_IV_eng.htm for the specific laws in question.
It appears to be a reaction to the Russian allofmp3 site, which was selling a lot of music at prices undercutting iTunes, but while it claimed to be collecting royalties, it had no license agreements with the record labels, was not authorized to collect revenue for them, and was not actually paying royalties to the labels or the bands released by those labels. The existence of the site was an issue in Russia's admittance to the WTO in 2006.
The site further claims "Service meets the requirements of the majority of the states of the Europe and the USA, although it is not possible to guarantee the legality of the work of Service in all States. In such rare instances the responsibility for use of Service lies with the user."
So I'm forced to wonder if anyone actually
making the music sold on the site sees a dime from sales through the site, and I'm certainly not going to assume their site verbiage will protect me if someone like the RIAA inquires about my purchases. They may say they're legal. The record industry may have a different opinion.
They may
be legal, but I'm not interested in being a potential test case.
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Dennis