Pressure on everyone's favourite rogue Russian download site, allofmp3.com, grew yesterday after a Danish court made a potentially precedent setting ruling that ordered internet service provider Tele2 to block access to the digital music service. The order came following litigation from the Danish branch of the International Federation Of The Phonographic Industry, and may lead to other branches of the IFPI, or affiliated trade bodies, taking similar action.
Assuming Tele2 comply with the court order, customers who access the internet via its servers will now not be able to reach the cut price download platform which claims to be operating according to Russian copyright laws but which, the IFPI says, is operating illegally.
The Danish ruling follows decisions by credit card firms Visa and Mastercard to not accept payments from the Russian music service, and efforts by US officials negotiating Russia's entry into the World Trade Organisation to ensure the authorities there close any loopholes in their copyright laws that allow allofmp3.com to trade legitimately domestically.
Welcoming the ruling yesterday, IFPI chief John Kennedy told reporters: "This judgment is one more step along the road to getting this rogue site closed down. Allofmp3.com illegally offers for sale copies of music that it has no right to reproduce or distribute. It provides unfair competition to the nearly 400 legal sites worldwide that respect the rights of composers, artists and record producers".
The ruling may, of course, have wider implications in that it essentially makes ISPs responsible, to a certain extent, for policing the net. Ib Tolstrip, the leader of an industry group who represent the Danish telecommunications industry, told Computerworld Denmark that that was a role the internet service providers did not want to take on: "We are horrified over this judgment, to say the least. It means that we must now keep an eye on what our users are doing online. And blocking user access to certain websites will never be a perfect solution. This can spread anywhere. Next time we might be asked to block pages with illegal software or something like that. But we will always demand a court order before acting on these requests".