EMI announced it will start selling mp3 in Russia on Jun 5 with Soundkey.ru online music store. Soundkey was founded at the end of last year to act on the direct label-to-store licensing scheme as opposed to Allofmp3.com 'legal piracy' model. Although EMI was first to release tracks without DRM protection in Apple's iTunes store, its Russian represantative say, the company is not ready yet to do this on Russian market. At the moment Soundkey is selling 10,000 albums from Sony BMG, $0,58 per song. 'It may take EMI a year or so to offer DRM-free mp3 to Russian consumers", Soundkey's CEO Sonya Sokolova assumes.

Police of Altaisky region in assistance with INTERPOL arrested a group of porn distributors. Three Barnaul residents are accused of producing and distributing materials with pornographic images of minors. They downloaded video from foreign websites, ripped CDs and distributed porn by mail. They accepted payments via postal orders, WebMoney and mobile phone accounts. Police say this group provided half of childporn distributed in Russia, though they only earned 100,000 rubles in two years.

On May,7 Aleksandr Ponosov was found guilty of Microsoft's copyright infringement by using unlicensed Windows copies on school PCs. The court evaluated Microsoft's loss at 266,000 rubles and sentenced Ponosov to 5,000 rubles penalty, although the company had no money claims to the convict and said it would be satisfied with his public apology. Earlier the court below shut down the case relying on its 'insignificance'. Now Ponosov has lodged another appeal against the final decision claiming he's not guilty and would fight till it's possible.

Allofmp3.com press-service says Russian online music store has nothing to do with a britishman arrested yesterday in London, claimed to be "Allofmp3.com representative in Europe" by Western media.

'To our great surprise we learned from BBC news that a 25 year old male was a staff member of our European office', they say in the release, 'He was arrested yesterday, for selling vauchers to purchase music on Allofmp3.com, according to IFPI and BPI'.

The company with a long history of prosecution for copyright infringement (with little success though) says it works absolutely legally in terms of Russian law and keeps no business activites outside the Russian borders.

Further in the statement Allofmp3.com accuses IFPI of making up stories 'to attract attention to its business which looses any rational basis from day to day'. 'They caught a frauder selling gift certificates, invented this never-existed Allofmp3 headquarters and than promoted a brilliant operation of shutting down this evil haven. A young britishman fell a victim to majors fighting technical progress', Russian company concludes.