Has AllofMP3.com headed to the virtual hills over yonder in the Ukraine?
As the world knows by now, it's a (former ?) Russian-based music download site with the honour of having George W. weighed in against it.
That such a thing could actually be happening, an administration acting so blatantly in corporate movie and music cartel interests, is hardly credible. But then, so many things are hardly credible about the current Cheney / Bush government, it's no surprise. Because AllofMP3.com has indeed become an important, very public, American copyright whipping boy.
"I have a hard time imagining Russia becoming a member of the WTO and having a Web site like that up and running that is so clearly a violation of everyone's intellectual property rights," said US Trade Representative Susan Schwab last year.
The cartels also got the major credit card companies to block AllofMP3.com. So the pesky Russian site went to a pay-per-track, ad-based service with which is having considerably more success than SpiralFrog, a tacky corporate effort which seems to be coming apart at the seams.
In short, AllofMP3.com is surviving and even better, re-trenching in safer territory, from the look of it.
There have been no new albums added for more than a week but, "This has happened before when they have done maintenance to the system or switched operating system (like they did last year)," saysAllofMP3.com admirer Solaris in an email, going on:
But this time I was sure that something fishy was going on.
The first thing I did was to look up their IP-location. It used to be in downtown Moscow but now they're situated just a few miles north of The Black Sea (nicer climate I bet) in a Ukrainian town called Mykolayiv (population approximately 500.000).
Mediaservices still owns the old IP (87.242.93.250) but check out their new one (195.144.21.255) on any IP-locator (or better still - look up allofmp3.com) and see for yourself.
As I said, I had kind of suspected this would happen (at least some time before July 1 2007) and I even guessed the right country, joining some of my other favourites: MP3Stor.com, MP3Sugar.com, MP3.ua and Mclub.te.net.ua.
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