Whilst grazing through some Russia-related stories on the wires earlier on today one piece in particular caught my eye…
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Russia should shut down a pirate music Web site that is robbing U.S. recording companies of sales if it wants to become a member of the World Trade Organisation, the top U.S. trade official said on Wednesday.
"I have a hard time imagining Russia becoming a member of the WTO and having a Web site like that up and running that is so clearly a violation of everyone's intellectual property rights," U.S. Trade Representative Susan Schwab told reporters after a speech to a services industry organisation.
Schwab's office earlier this year identified allofmp3.com as one the world's most notorious marketplaces for pirated goods. Last week, she singled out the Web site as the "poster child" for illegal music sales over the Internet.
Anyone who has spent any length of time dealing with an overseas based call centre, or had their job outsourced to some 3rd World dictatorship, or paid Developed World prices for something manufactured by five year olds in Jakarta might like to mull over how this globalization thing works out in practice…
Apparently, it is OK to pay two hundred quid for an ipod assembled by people earning Chinese wage rates
But it is most definitely not OK to pay Russian prices for music to put on that ipod
Seems perfectly logical and fair enough to me.
Strictly in the interest of market research, I’ve just spent a happy half hour browsing through allofmp3.com.
It’s really quite well put together
And cheap as chips
But, best of all, the site allows you to share full length previews of all your favourite songs, including my latest discovery Richard Cheese and Lounge Against the Machine.
In the words of Wikipedia…
The band specializes in playing lounge-style covers of recent popular rock and rap tunes, including those with offensive lyrical content
Sadly, Dick’s outstanding covers of Holiday in Cambodia and Personal Jesus are not yet available on allofmp3.com, but these are…
Sunday Bloody Sunday (U2)
Gin n Juice (Snoop Dogg)
Rape Me (Nirvana)
If anyone is interested, the full album is available for $1.91 from allofmp3, or five times as much from itunes, or probably ten times as much if you use the UK itunes site.
2 comments:
Im liking the Cheese
This post reminded me that, before the days of 24x7 terrorism, terrorists and terrorism news, interrupted only by weather reports, I occasionally wrote about other things too - like the Internet and its part in the death of Capitalism.
Not that anyone mentions Capitalism or class politics much any more now that the Long War has been pronounced to be the World Vs Muslim people, even though it's still the same class war its always been.
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