AllOfMP3.com down, but not out
After a long twilight struggle, AllOfMP3.com is no more (sort of). The Russian government has finally bowed to international pressure and shut the site down. The move came as a condition for Russia's entry into the World Trade Organization: an offer that Russia could not refuse.
Context & Ripple Effects
AllOfMP3.com spent years selling major-label music at prices the labels never sanctioned, shielded by a Russian licensing setup that Western rightsholders refused to recognize. As reported yesterday, the Russian government has moved against the site — and per both the article and the BBC's matching report, the trigger was explicit: closing AllOfMP3 was made a condition of Russia's bid to enter the World Trade Organization.
First-order effects
- AllOfMP3.com's customers lose the cheapest large-catalog download store available, and the operators lose the business outright rather than negotiating royalties.
- The international recording industry's multi-year pressure campaign gets its principal target closed, converting an enforcement dispute into a completed action by the Russian state.
Second-order effects
- Other Russian download sites operating under the same contested licensing framework become the obvious next targets, since the WTO-accession lever now exists and has been shown to work.
- Legal digital-music retailers gain pricing room in markets where AllOfMP3's near-cost offerings had set an effective floor no licensed service could match.
Third-order effects
- Copyright enforcement is migrating from courtroom litigation to trade conditionality: accession benefits traded for domestic site closures sets a template other governments and rightsholders can reuse.
- If the pattern holds, national internet commerce becomes negotiable currency in trade talks — a precedent for how states treat online businesses that operate across borders under local-law cover.
The trend: Intellectual-property enforcement against cross-border online businesses is shifting from national courts to trade negotiations, with WTO leverage doing what years of legal threats could not.