It seems concerns earlier this week that rogue Russian download site AllofMP3.com had been closed down were unfounded, though there are reports that aspects of the digital music company's services are still not active.
As previously reported, Moscow based AllofMP3.com has proved popular with many online music fans but unpopular with the record industry, and for the same reasons - it sells major artist music at incredibly cheap prices (less than ten cents a track) in a non-DRM protected format. With global reach, the Russian service has been gaining popularity all around the world, with recent estimates saying it was the most used download service in the UK after iTunes.
The company behind the service says it is a legitimate operation working within Russian copyright laws and paying royalties to Russian collecting societies, but the International Federation Of The Phonographic Industry questions the service's legal status, especially on a global level.
Initial attempts by the IFPI to close the service down were called off after the industry association's Moscow based legal counsel told them they were unlikely to succeed in the Russian courts due to the country's weak copyright laws. However the industry continued to lobby politicians in their home countries, and certain political players in the US have been putting pressure on the Russian government, which is keen to join the World Trade Organisation, to sort out it intellectual property laws. To that end, Russian President Putin recently gave a speech advocating stricter IP regulations.
All of which meant that when AllofMP3 went offline earlier this week, citing 'server problems' on a holding page, there was fear among its consumer base that Russian authorities had acted and closed the service down - fears added to by rumours that Moscow authorities had seized the company's servers. However, an IFPI spokesman told reporters that they were not aware of any official action being taken against the download platform, adding that it seemed to be a genuine server problem that had caused the suspension of the service. A spokesman told file sharing news site Slyck.com: "As far as we know the site is genuinely down for repair. Russian authorities had ordered the seizure of some of the site's servers a couple of weeks ago, but it switched to new servers and the service carried on."
That assumption seems to have been true, with AllofMP3 now back online. However, with the Russian authorities seemingly keen to seem strict on copyright issues, it may only be a matter of time before AllofMP3, in its current form, goes offline for good.