Russia pulls plug on Allofmp3

 

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By Simon Aughton

Posted on 3 Jul 2007 at 12:01

The Russian government has finally pulled the plug on Allofmp3.com. The controversial music downloads website disappeared last week "for maintenance" but failed to reappear and an employee told The Times that it had folded under pressure from the country's government.

But no sooner had it closed down, than its owner, MediaServices, unveiled mp3sparks.com, which appears to be little more than Allofmp3 with a new name. As it did with the closed store, MediaServices insists that Mp3sparks operates legally within its home country through a licence from the Russian Multimedia and Internet Society (RMIS).

The music industry has always maintained that the RMIS has no rights over the music that it licenses. The US government agreed and pressured Russia into closing the site as a precondition of membership of the World Trade Organization. Russia bowed to that pressure in November of last year. It has taken seven months to comply, but doing so should help to smooth progress to WTO membership by the end of this year.

At the height of its popularity, Allofmp3.com had 5.5 million customers paying as little as 5p for DRM-free downloads. But that popularity waned amid concerns about who had access to the credit card information collected by the service, concerns that helped to persuade Visa and Mastercard to stop processing payments to the site.