The Wall Street Journal has an article on Russian music sites. Here are some relevant excerpts:
"...lawyers say buying music from the sites is as illegal as downloading it for free over a file-swapping network. "It doesn't matter if somebody downloads in the U.S. and believes that it's legal because the site tells them so," says Evan Cox, an intellectual property lawyer at the firm Covington & Burling in San Francisco.
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The sites offer several advantages, aside from price, over their U.S. counterparts. Most allow users to preview an entire song, compared with the 30-second clips on iTunes. Files can be downloaded in several formats (most U.S. sites serve up a single format) and the files have no built-in restrictions on how they can be used or copied once downloaded. Some sites let users download files encoded at much higher quality than U.S. services offer.
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The site obtains the music it sells by purchasing CDs in retail stores, he said, and receives some albums directly from record labels. He said the site pays licensing fees for the music it sells to a group called the Russian Organization for Multimedia & Digital Systems, or ROMS, which purports to represent Russian copyright holders. MP3search.ru and 3MP3.ru also say on their Web sites that they are licensed by ROMS.
Konstantin Leontiev, deputy director general for legal issues of ROMS, said in an e-mail statement that the group acts "in conformity with the requirements of the Russian laws." He said that the group's activities only cover users inside Russia, and said users outside Russia should consult local laws. He didn't respond to further questions.
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Going after users of the services could be difficult. "You'd have to subpoena the sites to get their records, and if they're operated out of Russia, it may not be such an easy task," says Michael S. Poster, a corporate and entertainment lawyer at Katten Muchin Zavis Rosenman in New York.
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Some users of the Russian sites complain in online forums about incomplete albums, poor customer service and slow downloads. One user on iPodLounge shared worries about handing over a credit card number to a Russian company -- some of the sites, including AllofMP3.com, require users to register and "fund" their accounts before they can buy songs.
AllofMP3.com once accepted payments through PayPal, but PayPal shut the company's account down after receiving reports that it sold unauthorized music, says Sara Bettencourt, a spokesperson for PayPal, a division of eBay Inc."
You can read the full article
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