A 25-year-old man was arrested in London following a pan-European investigation led by the music industry. The unnamed man is alleged to be the UK agent for Allofmp3.com, facilitating the sale of digital downloads by advertising and selling vouchers through auction sites such as eBay and the website Allofmp3vouchers.co.uk. That website has now been taken down. The vouchers contained a code that allowed European consumers to access and download music from the allofmp3.com website.
Charging £10 per voucher, the suspect was believed to be taking payment from European customers and transferring the cash into various offshore accounts operated by the site's Russian owners, according to a joint statement from global recording industry body IFPI and the UK record companies' association the BPI.
Metropolitan Police officers seized computer equipment and paperwork for further investigation. Early indications suggest the pirate operation may have generated criminal proceeds for the Russian website running into the tens of thousands of pounds, according to the joint statement.
As the unlicensed sale of music is a criminal offence in the UK, police executed the raid under Section 2 of the Fraud Act 2006 which created the offence of fraud by false representation. This is the first time the new fraud legislation has been used in a copyright-related case since coming into force on 1st January 2007.
Allofmp3.com significantly undercuts iTunes and other licensed download services but it operates without permission from record companies. The site claims to have an agreement with a Russian copyright organisation, ROMS. However, no BPI or IFPI-member record companies have mandated ROMS to license the sale of their music via the internet either in Russia or anywhere else and ROMS has been expelled from the international copyright confederation CISAC.
Allofmp3.com is being sued for copyright infringement of copyright in the UK, US and France and criminal proceedings are ongoing in Russia against the former managing director of the service. There has been a court injunction against the site in Germany, and the shutdown and criminal investigation of the portal allofmp3.it in Italy. A court order requiring ISPs to block access to allofmp3.com is already in place in Denmark.
PayPal, MasterCard and Visa have withdrawn their payment facilities from Allofmp3.com "because of its flagrant infringement of copyright," according to the IFPI / BPI statement.
John Kennedy, chairman and chief executive of IFPI, said: “Allofmp3.com is illegal in Russia, the US, the UK and everywhere else in the world. The action announced today is the latest to highlight Allofmp3.com’s long and undistinguished history of stealing music from artists, composers and record producers and selling it at a profit."
