The world's four largest music companies accuse the Russian download site for copyright infringement, seeking $150,000 per alleged violation.
Maverick Russian music download site AllofMP3.com had already faced a lawsuit in the UK, had credit giants Visa and Mastercard yank their payment support, and saw the US government say that Russia's entry into the WTO hinged on its ability to shut the site down.
The other shoe dropped yesterday, when the four major record labels filed a copyright infringement suit against the site's owner Mediaservices. From June through October alone, the RIAA claims more than 11 million songs were downloaded illegally from the site by US customers, and the suit seeks damages at a rate of $150,000 per alleged copyright violation--for a total of a whopping $1.65 trillion.
In a complaint filed in US District Court for the Southern District of New York, the Recording Industry Association of America, on behalf of major labels EMI, Sony BMG, Universal Music, and Warner Music, accused Web site AllofMP3.com of being a "notorious online black market" and a "poster child" for Internet music piracy." The lawsuit was filed against Moscow-based Mediaservices, which owns AllofMP3 and another music site, allTunes.com.
Unlike the peer-to-peer (P2P) file-sharing services that have faced the music industry's legal wrath over the years, AllofMP3 charges for downloads, but does so at a fraction of the market rate, charging less than $1 for full albums.
"[The] defendant's entire business...amounts to nothing more than a massive infringement of plaintiffs' exclusive rights under the Copyright Act and New York law," the industry said in the complaint.
The site has argued that it pays royalties through ROMS, the Russian agency that collects royalties. The RIAA has said that it does not recognize ROMS as a collecting agency for the labels and has never received any royalty payments from the site.
The US Department of Commerce calls AllofMP3.com the world's highest-volume online seller of pirated music, collecting annual revenue in excess of $30 million from its 5.5 million subscribers.
