In Russia, there are different rules regarding royalty payments. The economy is still slowly recovering it’s strength, buoyed by covert sales of concrete slabs from the Berlin Wall for display under the glass tops of fashionable coffee tables in Paris and New York. Unlike the West, Russia doesn’t pay quite as much when the royalties for Internet performances or sales of songs come due. Discounted payments to the labels and distribution companies in league with the Recording Industry Association of America are the norm for a variety of struggling countries.

If you weren’t aware of it, I’d now like to mention that there are large groups of well educated programmers and database builders in Russia (and the Ukraine, etc. for that matter) who not only know what they are doing but also know how to make a buck when it the opportunity is ripe. Colossal amounts of spam driven emails have emerged from unrestricted .RU domains for many years, and the people who run these outfits, well…their mentality seems to be ’strike while the iron is blazing hot and capable of annoying almost anyone with an email address.’

Out of this free market meltdown a unique Internet opportunity emerges, AllOfMP3.com, a Russian music site with the through-put of Itunes and with a pricing structure that can’t be beat with a digital stick. Music lovers in Europe swear by it. It charges by the bandwidth (translation: how good of an MP3 file do you want? The best? That will cost you dimes on the dollar instead of pennies). They can charge less because they pay less in royalties, which has suddenly become quite a thorn in the side of the RIAA. Due to a lot of fists shaking in the air about intellectual property rights, the Russian government was recently coerced into taking AllOfMP3.com to court. Did a cease and desist order result from a conviction of guilty?

No.

Why?

Well, that question will not be answered easily. Uppermost, they did not violate Russian law.

And now there is a new paradigm on the horizon.

YouTube.com, that unholy behemoth, is as much of a hot property as it is a liability. Who is going to pay the film maker for their video of a farmer being raped by a cow? How can the copyright violators on the site be smoked out and shut down? What will make a site with more visitors than Google become a viable Internet property?

As content rises from its knees and is throned queen, the music industry behaves like a vinyl poisoned king, struggling for a foothold in this new land, aching for a glimpse into the future of how creativity can be shackled and squeezed for all the the same turnip’s worth, trudging the same well worn steps to domination that has served it well since mass media became the definition of the airwaves in the form of radio and television.

The open nature of the Internet has started a shift away from cultural, political, monetary and religious control of information and expression. It’s pointing all of our hopes, fears and dreams toward a unified feild theory: That we are all just individuals on one tiny planet, and that sharing is a good and fine thing to do.

Any kindergartener will tell you that is so.