Websites that offer music downloads are more popular than ever. The reason is simple : Music on cd or dvd or another carrier is too expensive. Personally I can't speak for the USA, but in Europe it's sad to see how the record companies work together with the stores to make money of us they will never pay the artists.

AllOfMp3, a russian site that offers legal downloads of music, has received a lot of heat lately after all sites based in europe have been closed down by people that believe this is an artist rip-off.

Vadim Mamotin, director general of the site's parent company, Mediaservices : "In six years of operation we have never been convicted by a Russian court or declared illegal, under Russian law we are 100 percent legal."(International Herald Tribune)

The company pays a fee (about 15% of all transactions) to ROMS, the Russian Multimedia and Internet Society. I don't see a problem and I hope they will survive this, as the US and several European countries try to make them quit by threatening Russia not to obtain an entry into the World Trade Organization.

AllOfMp3 has a very strong response to this : They announced Music for the Masses, a service that enables users to freely listen to music on one computer at the time, using software developed for this task. This way they hope to get a bigger community of users and a bigger market for advertising. I think politicians are a threat to the internet.

Free the net. Let them go, they mean no harm !!