The RIAA has declared complete victory over the infamous Russian music download store AllofMP3 which was accused of selling tracks but not giving any of the proceeds to the artists or record labels.
At its peak, the site had 6 million users who legally downloaded songs and full albums for cheaper than 1/3 the price of iTunes or Amazon. The RIAA said however that the record labels and the artists were not seeing any of this money and filed complaints to get the WTO to shut the site down. In 2007, the site was shut down and the RIAA praised the decision. However, in October of that year, the site was acquitted of any charges and a district court in Moscow confirmed the innocent verdict after an appeal by the record industry group. Despite being innocent, the site shut down and no longer offers music.
It now appears that this week the RIAA dropped its copyright infringement lawsuit against AllofMP3 and claimed victory.
“The site is now defunct and out of business, the result of a successful anti-piracy initiative,” Jonathan Lamy, an RIAA spokesman said.
That may be true, but following the media AllofMP3 received, almost a dozen similar sites have sprung up and are currently fully operational. Even funnier, the founders of AllofMP3 have started a new site called Mp3Sparks which operates exactly the same as the now “defunct” AllofMP3 did.
Talking about the dropping of the lawsuit, John Crossman, representative of the site’s owner, MediaServices LLC says, “They [RIAA] never correctly commenced the proceeding in the first place…Maybe it was a rare triumph of good sense.”
Result for: MP3
Last month we reported that Wal-Mart was shutting down its MP3 DRM servers, effectively killing off any music you have purchased from the retailer, unless you burn the music to CD and then rip it back DRM-free.
It appears the giant retailer has done an about face after public backlash and will keep the servers running at “the present time,” according to Ravi Jariwala, a Walmart.com spokesman.
The decision follows that of both Yahoo and MSN who decided to shut down their servers and reversed the decision after public backlash.
“(Walmart.com) will continue to evaluate options and no decisions have been made at this point. In the meantime, we’ll continue to offer MP3 downloads through our online music store and will assist with DRM issues for protected Windows Media Audio (WMA) files purchased from Walmart.com,” added Jariwala.
Result for: MP3
In the third of five lawsuits brought forth against Microsoft by Alcatel-Lucent SA, a federal jury has ruled that the Microsoft Xbox 360 console does not violate any patents held my Alcatel-Lucent and threw the case out.
The technologies company had wanted $420 million USD in damages. On the other side however, Microsoft had counter-sued for $11.5 million USD in damages, claiming that Alcatel-Lucent had infringed one of their patents.
The jury ruled that “one of Microsoft’s patents was invalid and found that Alcatel-Lucent didn’t violate another four of the company’s patents.”
Last year, in the first of the five trials, a jury ruled that Microsoft’s Windows Media Player “infringed Alcatel-Lucent’s patents for the MP3 digital-audio standard” and awarded the latter company a huge $1.52 billion USD settlement. The verdict however is now on appeal and it appears the damages award will be lessened.
Two months ago, another federal jury awarded Alcatel-Lucent $368 million USD for “Microsoft’s infringement of its patents for touch-screen form entry and use of a computer stylus.”
