> The question now is will the Russians take steps to close the service
> down immediately or wait until its formal entry into the WTO, still
> threatened by former soviet satellites Moldova and Georgia.
This is all just noise and music industry FUD which obscures the fact that the corporations lost the file sharing wars years ago. It's relatively easy to swat a big fly, much harder to eliminate a huge swarm of file sharing gnats. With the current technology, it's pretty easy for people to share music off the radar.
The music industry is just a big stupid dinosaur which could have figured out ways to make money in ways that coexist with file sharing.
Some of us were totally turned off from buying music by $18 CDs that were being sold by greedy corporations. It's too bad that chains like Tower are being put out of business by music industry greed.
Chuck