I do think, however, that the facts that it a) chooses to cite as the main bit of its exhaustive analysis of US copyright law that well known authority, “a thread on the fatwallet forums,” and b) goes on to make the assumption that downloading is equivalent to importing a possession as “part of [your] personal baggage,” should very much be construed to diminish the authority of the site. They quite clearly don’t have a clue, and are speculating wildly.
The existence of the site is not legal under Russian law. I don’t think anyone’s disputed that. The question is whether, under US law, downloading from the site is illegal. The legal snippet you quote deals with distribution and reproduction, not purchases of copyright material.
Errr, make that “The existence of the site is not illegal…”!!
I don’t get it.
Given how diligently the mods stomp on any thread that gets within shouting distance of the line, let alone cross it, there is so little open discussion on this general topic on this board that it’s no longer covering all the bases (legal or otherwise) in answering the questions. There are other sites out there which discuss this, openly and in constant danger of lawsuit and liability. You want an apple, go to the tree.
I also don’t get this:
“It’s legal to do this, unless it isn’t.”
Um, thanks?
Makes sense to me. “We aren’t breaking Russian law by selling you this stuff, if you’re breaking the law where you reside, that’s your problem”. Seems fair enough to me as a disclaimer. No different to the front page of hustler.com:
It’s legal for Hustler to sell the stuff from a US base, but if you signed up from Iran, or Saudi Arabia, you’d be asking for a lot of trouble.
Does this mean that discussion of online poker is going to get stomped too? Because the U.S. Govt believes that it’s illegal. Of course, it’s not illegal here in the U.K.
Now, AFAIAA, neither of these have been tested in court, so perhaps the principle of presumption of innocence until proven guilty (or rather precedent in this case) should apply?
And US copyright law applies to sites in Russia…how, exactly? Cite?
If I go to Russia and buy an IP product which is legal under their laws, what exact US law have I violated? I can’t find one, can you? If I go to England and buy a Region 2 DVD there, have I violated US copyright law too? Do I violate it by bringing it to the US with me? Remember that some of us maintain homes in more than one country.
This is covered by the relevant bit of US copyright law covering importation of personal possessions as part of your personal baggage, for personal use (which, as you point out, is fine, although note it is explicitly excepted, rather than simply assumed to be legal). It’s a bit of a stretch to say that downloading a copy from a foreign server is the same, when an (IMO) stronger case could be made that the act of downloading is more akin to making a reproduction in the US than it is to bringing an LP in through the borders. Similarly, I could contend that it is allofmp3 doing the importation, and that they are therefore violating the copyright provision by subsequently selling their imported goods. You’d certainly be hard pushed to show that the equivalence of data transmission and physical importation has been legally established, which is what is necessary for you to claim that allofmp3.com users are protected by this bit of copyright law.
Could be wrong, of course; any US lawyers know of any decisions relating to international data transmission, and/or who is doing the “reproduction” when a file is downloaded?
Thank you, alterego, for starting this thread. I was just coming in here to start it myself 
My question is this: Is it now against board rules to simply ask if something is illegal in the US or not? I was not promoting that website, yet I had to link to it for other people to know which particular one I was asking about. Why was it shut down?
Surely allofmp3 are exporting, and it is the purchaser who is importing?
Here’s my take, which is related to my kiddie porn analogy.
The production of X may be legal under the laws of the jurisdiction in which it is done. But X is a portable product, capable of being moved across international boundaries, in this case by electronic means.
So it may be legal for them to stockpile and upload bootleg mp3s in Russia. But it is illegal for someone physically located in America to download the same, as that constitutes importation in violation of American copyright law.
If a multimillionaire Doper goes to his resort cottage on Tuvalu, where it is legal to download things from that Russian site, then he’s broken no law. He has not imported it into the United States. (The same would also be valid for any nation included in the copyright convention, to avoid making this too U.S.-centric.)
Now, as to why sam was right in closing the thread: The SDMB is in many respects a public forum, but in one critical one it is not: it is subject to the rules established by the Chicago Reader, Inc., to which one agrees on signing up and to modifications of which one agrees by continuing one’s membership.
Among those rules is one that indicates that no active guidance or facilitation in how to break U.S. (and by implication Illinois) law will be permitted. The moderating staff here has been quite stringent in enforcing that provision as against copyright violations, presumably at Reader behest.
Sam’s call was that whatever the legality of the Russian site, importation of its stock in trade to Chicago would constitute a copyright violation. So he closed it. Properly.
A “kiddie porn” analogy is a whole different matter to start with. We’re talking about completely different sections of the law and precedent (criminal versus civil, for one).
And here again the analogy falls short. No one has shown that the MP3s are illegal or “bootleg” under Russian law.
No one has provided a cite that says an IP product legal in Russia cannot be transferred into the US.
Either we just say “something looks illegal so it must be” or else we find out for certain if it is or not. Dead Badger helpfully provided some good thought experiementation, but this unfortunately does not really constitute a cite to one side or the other. It might be illegal, but I suspect strongly that it is in fact not illegal at all. Not that that will matter at all in the end, however.
At heart, other than the IP side of it, which is of academic interest, I don’t care at all about the “acceptability” discussion on here. It’s been shown repeatedly that any time a ruling is “don’t talk about this” then that’s that. It simply is and people need to wake up and realize that there’s a whole big, wide web out there besides the SDMB. Start with Google and work your way down.
Which was a lame one. I prefer my ‘yelling fire in a crowded theatre’ one. Illegal in Canada (perhaps, who knows). If I ask if it’s illegal in the US, I’m asking for information and a cite, and I don’t think it’s unreasonable to expect the thread to stay open.
Except that (according to the site), they aren’t bootleg mp3s, the operators of the site have payed for them in accordance with the laws of the country. In that respect, it’s much more like going to Russia, buying a (presumably cheaper) LP of Neil Sedaka, and putting it in your carry-on on the flight back. My co-worker is Chinese, and on her last trip there brought back a (legally purchased) Soundgarden CD - cost to her: ~2$. Was it illegal for her to fly back with it? No. Would it be illegal to buy an mp3 from China and transfer it over the net here? I dunno, perhaps I should start a thread. Oh wait, liirogue already did, and it got locked.
Except the OP wasn’t about asking how to break the law, it was about asking if it was even illegal in the first place, a (and I repeat myself) legitimate question. If Sam had chosen to say “This is a tricky subject for this board, but the legality of the site is questionable and in the interests of not being caught in an RIAA suit I have to close this thread”, I could half-way accept that. But saying “What they’re doing is illegal in the US.” is crap.
In Soviet Russia, cites bitched you!!
I assume we’re talking about dowloading material from the site to your U.S. based computer while sitting in the U.S.
If so, then I already quoted that part – the Copyright Act says that the rightsholder has exclusive right to copy or authorize copying. But downloading the file to your PC, you’re making a copy. This analysis is independant of whether the site is legal in Russia and provides a service where rightholders are compensated appropriately as defined under Russian law. You’re in the U.S. You’re making a copy. You don’t have the right to do that without the rightsholder’s permission.
If I go to Russia and buy an IP product which is legal under their laws, what exact US law have I violated? I can’t find one, can you?
[/quote]
If you stay in Russia? Maybe not. But that isn’t analagous to downloading from the site in question, which causes you to make a copy without persmission from the rightsholder.
–Cliffy
This is the important bit, right here. It bears repeating: When you download a file, YOU are making a COPY of that file. You are not obtaining a copy that someone else has (legally) made for you and bringing in to the country. The exception for importation in the statute quoted would apply if that were the case, but it is not. Regardless of whether the Russian site is legal or illegal IN Russia, it is illegal for a US resident to download copyrighted material from that site from within the US, as Cliffy asserts.
Cliffy is entirely correct, as is Q.E.D..
Polycarp, your child pornography analogy has got to go.
phew.
That’s the thing here, Samclem, you’re asking me for the exact same thing I am asking from you, a cite. The difference is that I can’t lock the thread. So, give me a legal cite, from a US court, that it’s illegal to download copyrighted material from another country. That’s a hard one, because obviously, every country has different laws.
If it is legal for you to purchase from the distributor in the first place, and they are following the laws of their country, then the only question is if it is legal for you to make a copy of or simply obtain the item. Your opinion is no. I think that’s lovely and moreover cute. See the title of this thread.
Your opinion is not well-founded as stated in the General Questions forum. At least one other opinion in that thread cited US legal code. Since you offered nothing your opinion there is the same (nothing).
I’d like to hear more about what declaring things to be illegal willy-nilly has to do with your responsibilities as a mod. A GQ mod at that! The Allofmp3 topic deserved to be answered in GQ, this thread was started moreso because of your actions. Since the GQ thread is closed without good cause both will have to be discussed here.
You are improperly arguing that it is one or the other of a reproduction or an import. In the case of downloading, however, you cannot have one without the other. Case in point (use VisualRoute if you prefer a graphical representation):
traceroute allofmp3.com
traceroute: Warning: allofmp3.com has multiple addresses; using 195.96.170.20
traceroute to allofmp3.com (195.96.170.20), 30 hops max, 38 byte packets
1 muen-gw-muen210.colorado.edu (128.138.210.1) 0.306 ms 0.225 ms 0.206 ms
2 tcom-muen.colorado.edu (128.138.81.74) 0.266 ms 0.226 ms 0.212 ms
3 hut-tcom.colorado.edu (128.138.81.130) 0.285 ms 0.266 ms 0.262 ms
4 juniper-hut.colorado.edu (128.138.81.250) 0.367 ms 0.390 ms 0.362 ms
5 tcom-juniper-juniper.colorado.edu (128.138.81.241) 0.475 ms 0.463 ms 0.408 ms
6 165.236.232.193 (165.236.232.193) 1.688 ms 1.656 ms 1.968 ms
7 170.147.161.94 (170.147.161.94) 1.986 ms 1.815 ms 1.907 ms
8 dvr-edge-09.inet.qwest.net (65.121.56.105) 1.878 ms 1.759 ms 1.730 ms
9 dia-core-01.inet.qwest.net (205.171.10.37) 1.875 ms 1.896 ms 1.980 ms
10 dal-core-02.inet.qwest.net (67.14.2.10) 23.492 ms 23.425 ms 40.802 ms
11 dap-brdr-01.inet.qwest.net (205.171.225.53) 23.521 ms 23.595 ms 23.625 ms
12 POS1-1.BR2.LAX9.ALTER.NET (204.255.168.37) 24.330 ms 24.178 ms 24.408 ms
13 0.so-3-3-0.XL1.DFW9.ALTER.NET (152.63.99.1) 24.519 ms 24.467 ms 24.545 ms
14 0.so-7-0-0.XL1.NYC4.ALTER.NET (152.63.10.21) 55.090 ms 54.386 ms 54.355 ms
15 POS6-0.IG3.NYC4.ALTER.NET (152.63.24.33) 54.277 ms 54.475 ms 54.449 ms
16 classnet3-gw.customer.alter.net (65.206.120.254) 186.707 ms 186.980 ms 186.761 ms
17 d1-msk-m10-lt-1-2-0-v1.ruscomnet.ru (80.249.132.1) 192.788 ms 192.678 ms 193.573 ms
18 ROSNET-gw.ruscomnet.ru (80.249.134.134) 192.440 ms 199.759 ms 199.530 ms
19 dpt.spica.rosnet.net (195.90.129.226) 198.778 ms 193.034 ms 193.309 ms
20 antares.rosnet.net (195.90.129.66) 195.235 ms 195.825 ms 194.425 ms
21 195.96.170.20 (195.96.170.20) 195.932 ms 193.860 ms 195.022 ms
As I said above, you are not merely making a copy. It’s not as if you are at the public library in Podunk USA and making a full copy of a book. You are purchasing a product that resides in Russia from a Russian company which legally owns a copy of the item. It is legal for you to import something purchased in Russia so long as the product is legal in both countries. And it is.
This may be false. Allofmp3 does real time encoding of the files you choose into the format you choose at the quality you choose. Thus, on their servers, they create the product for you as you request it.
I don’t see how that follows from the quoted passage, or from anything else here. When you download a song from iTunes, you’re making a copy of the song too. Presuming you accept that as being legal, it must be the nationality of the source where the problem is.
Are you saying people in the U.S. can only solicit music sites (like iTunes, mp3.com, etc) where the company is based in the U.S? 
No. When you download from iTunes and other legit sites, you making a copy under a license implicity granted to you by the copyright holder. No such license exists when using allofmp3.com, as far as I can tell.
Alterego, even if what you say is true, YOU are still making a copy of the material–there is no way around that. Whether allofmp3.com prepares a file on demand for you to download, there’s no escaping that fact. If the site were burning files to a CD, then mailing that CD to you, then that would be a different situation.