IFPI comes up with plan b (or, more like it, plan z) to "end piracy"

The IFPI - which is the RIAA pretending to be an international body - has come up with a new plan which it reckons will bring about an end to online music piracy.

This time, it's going to get British police and the credit card companies to do the job for it.

The idea is that it'll find a website which is flogging tracks online; details will be passed to the police; public money will be spent investigating the sites and, if the police agree there's something dodgy going on, Mastercard and Visa will be alerted and they'll stop processing payments for the site.

The idea of targeting people who are selling tracks they don't own online is a fair one - there's a clear difference between people who share music out of love of music, and people who sell things that aren't theirs out of love of money.

Mind you, anyone who can get past that rubbish Verified By Visa "security" box probably deserves to download half the internet as a reward anyway.

It's unlikely the scheme will be a success - it's being run through City Of London police who are unlikely to do more than scratch the surface of the problem; there are other ways to make money online than just taking credit card details and this won't have an effect on sharing where no money is changing hands - which seems to be most cases. But at least the IFPI are mounting their Quixotic efforts against people who are diverting money that might otherwise have been spent on official products.

Allofmp3 cleared

In a bad loss for the music industry, a Russian court has cleared Denis Kvasov, head of Allofmp3 of charges relating to copyright theft. It seems, under Russian law, payments to ROM count, even if ROM is not affiliated to the RIAA-IFPI:

Kvasov always said he was within the law because the site paid part of its income to ROMS, a Russian organisation which collects and distributes fees for copyright holders.

The judge agreed with his defence.

"Everybody who uses soundtracks has to pay a certain amount of their income to the rights holders and this company has done that," she said. "MediaServices has paid a certain amount of money to ROMS."

The IFPI has announced plans to appeal - really, it has no choice now, as its actions so far have turned a grey area into a legal acceptance of Allofmp3's business plan. And it's not just the labels who will be hoping this judgement gets reversed - Visa might find itself in a bit of an awkward position if it has to explain why it stopped processing credit card payments for a perfectly legal business.

Visa can't block Allofmp3.com

It might seem to be a moot point with Allofmp3.com currently switched off, but a Russian court has ruled that Visa has no right to refuse to process payments for Allofmp3 or similar sites. In what appears to be the first legal ruling on the legitimacy of AllofMP3, the court found against Visa's claims the site was illegal as it was paying royalty rates to ROM, a Russian rights agency (although, crucially, not part of the RIAA-IFPI global grouping).

The court did allow that rights holders were free to pursue actions against AllofMP3, but since neither Visa nor the IFPI hold any of the rights they were "protecting", they had no legal basis for their complaints, according to reports from Russian IT site Cnews.