So the World Trade Organization seems to have finally convinced the Russian government to take action on one of its favourite bugaboos: the existence of “pirate” music site Allofmp3.com, which has been happily charging people pennies to download millions of mp3 files from popular artists from around the world for several years now. According to the Times Online, the site was quietly closed — about six months after Visa and MasterCard cut off service to the site — but as the same story points out, another site called Mp3Sparks.com popped up the same day, offering virtually the exact same service, and apparently run by the same outfit (the company says that it abides by Russian copyright law, which allows companies to collect royalties on behalf of copyright owners, without the copyright owners’ permission). As TorrentFreak suggests, downloading of digital music has effectively become a hydra. And apparently I’m not the only one that is fond of the Whack-A-Mole metaphor.
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