Russia - RIAA's worst enemy

This week I finally discovered two online music sites operating in Russia RIAA must be mad as hell about.

The sites in question are allofmp3.com and mp3search.ru. Downloads from either service have no DRM whatsoever.

allofmp3.com, operating since 2001, looks very impressive. They charge $.01 or $.02 / megabyte, depending on how you download the music. Their "killer app" is online encoding, which enables you to choose the encoding method (mp3, wma, ogg vorbis, musepack and aac), and the quality of the encoding. For some albums in their catalog they also offer lossless encoding enabling you to download exact copies of the audio CD, and burn the songs into an audio CD, instead of mp3 files.

Both appear to be operating entirely legally according to Russian copyright law, which dates back to the Soviet Union era. Since downloading copyrighted music for personal use is perfectly legal, it is legal to use these services even from within the United States. RIAA will, of course, tell you otherwise, but has so far been unsuccessful in shutting these services down. The law, for once, appears to be on the side of the consumer.

A great review of allofmp3.com is up on museekster.com. The review clarifies the legality of the service(s) quite well.

Up yours, RIAA scum.

-TPP