Beatles copyright case down a legal rabbit hole
Last week, a music site called BlueBeat made headlines by offering Beatles songs as free streams and 25 cent downloads. The Beatles are known for not making their songs legally available on iTunes or any other online forum, so observers rightly asked "how are they doing this legally?"
EMI, the record label that owns The Beatles' recordings, has a simple response: they're not doing this legally. But here's where the story gets very strange.
The legal reasoning in this case is straight out of "Alice in Wonderland."
(Credit: Wikimedia Commons (public domain illustration))BlueBeat is owned by a company called Media Rights Technologies, which specializes in digital rights management technology. DRM is supposed to be used to prevent copyright infringement. But according to a 2007 blog post on HuffingtonPost.com by the company's founder, Hank Risan, MRT backed into this business after being--get this--targeted by the RIAA for copyright infringement.
As Risan explains in his post, he and a partner had posted a bunch of streaming-audio files to a Web site about the history of music. The RIAA issued a takedown notice, and the site took the streams down.
The streams had been protected by Windows Media DRM, but according to Risan, an update to the Media Player broke the DRM. In response to this flaw, Risan created MRT and built his own DRM system, which he claimed would be far more robust than the systems on the market at that time. Then, in 2007, MRT sent cease-and-desist letters to Microsoft, Apple, Adobe, and RealNetworks, ordering them to use MRT's DRM technology instead of their own, on threat of legal action.
The legal reasoning was twisted--basically, MRT argued that the Digital Millennium Copyright Act should force these companies to use the most robust DRM technology available, even if that technology was created by somebody else. Predictably, nothing ever came of this demand.
MRT's legal reasoning is equally funny this time around, as Ars Technica reports. According to the report, MRT claims that it didn't post the exact Beatles recordings. Instead, it posted "psychoacoustic simulations," then added simple video content to them. This constitutes a new audiovisual work, and isn't covered by the existing copyrights, MRT argues. In fact, MRT even went so far as to apply for copyrights on the "new" works!
Perhaps this is all some kind of metacommentary on the frustrating inconsistency of U.S. copyright law, but I predict that MRT is going to be laughed out of court. In the meantime, if you want your Beatles music online, it's still available on BlueBeat as of the time I posted this. I didn't want to give the company a credit card to test the whether the downloads work, but the streams sound pretty close to perfect...especially considering that they're only psychoacoustic simulations.
Matt Rosoff is an analyst with Directions on Microsoft, where he covers Microsoft's consumer products and corporate news. He's written about the technology industry since 1995, and reviewed the first Rio MP3 player for CNET.com in 1998. He is a member of the CNET Blog Network. Disclosure. You can follow Matt on Twitter @mattrosoff. 
It's only the nuance of how different the works need to be to be covered by the existing laws and agreemetns vs. a blatant rip off of the orginal work.
And, yes, If I were to record the song and release, there's little or nothing anyone can do to stop me from distributing the recordings as long as I pay the legal fees and royalties. That doesn't appear to be what these guys are doing, either.
Good luck with that, MRT!
I made my own pyschoacoustic recordings as well. I used software to read the original music, then completely switched the bits around. The result was very similar to the original, but had some tinny sounds and extra static. It definitely wasn't the original song anymore. It wasn't even 1/10 the size of the original file.
Key phrase of the day: Derivative work.
I think they actually did get copyrights!! haha
damn i can't download it from bluebeats anymore! :(
Just shows that you can delay things a very long time in court while still in business.
I did figure out their ultimate goal though. They wanted to copyright a ripped version of the songs, then they were going to go around suing people for doing the same thing. They were trying to replace the RIAA! The RIAA should think about suing them for that.
So you are saying that a bank robber that is so obviously guilty doesn't get a lawyer and if one represents him, the lawyer should be disbarred?
I guess the constitution and bill of rights has no meaning for you? Assuming you are an American of course.
Think about it, it's not stupid. How much court time could be saved? How much of our tax money could be saved? This kind of stuff is so stupid it's enraging. This defense is clearly idiotic, will be defeated (temporary restraining order already handed down today), we need to reevaluate the lawyers that participate. Call me stupid, ok, but I'm proposing the saving of money, your money.
Allow me to reiterate so you can understand: I do not believe lawyers should be disbarred in criminal court cases for defending people. I believe lawsuits need changed, especially frivolous damage suits and IP law.
I don't see architects collecting fees 30 years later.
If the copyright laws in the US were rational, the Beatles music would be in the public domain by now.
If the Beatles had bothered to make their music available online through a vendor - Amazon, iTunes, Zune or whatever - they could have avoided this whole can of worms.
Good points.
As a legal argument, a better description is psycho-ceramic. As in crackpot.
- by mojobone November 29, 2009 5:22 AM PST
- @nicmart :
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(41 Comments)<i>The important thing is we don't want Paul and Ringo to descend into poverty, which is their immediate threat. Oh, if only they had won the lawsuit to force Apple out of the music player/song retailing business.</i><p>
The reason they didn't win is because they <i>settled</i> with Apple Computers; I doubt we'll meet up with either in the dole queue.<p>
@MattC867:
<i>Not many posters here seem to know that the surviving members of the Beatles don't even own their own music. To me, the fact that the original creators don't even own their work anymore highlights the idiocy of modern intellectual property and copyright laws.</i><p>
What's idiotic about the Beatles being allowed to sell their interest in an intellectual property? That's how they were separated from their rights in the first place-the payment of large sums of cash on the barrelhead in return for <i>possible</i> royalties/returns at a later time. Not many posters here seem to know that the Beatles themselves never owned the rights to their recordings, (not directly, but through whatever stake the individuals each had in Apple, beginning only in the latter stages of their career) nor that there's a difference between a copyrighted song and a copyrighted sound recording. <p>
@pentest
<i>"Why should a band that hasn't existed in decades still be able to make money off it?
I don't see architects collecting fees 30 years later.
If the copyright laws in the US were rational, the Beatles music would be in the public domain by now."</i><p>
True, you don't see architects collecting money after the building's built, but the <i>owners</i> continue to collect rent as long as the building stands and people still wish to pay for its use. Perhaps architects should negotiate points if they wish to collect, as I'd imagine the architect of the Beatles sound, Sir George Martin may have done. As a matter of opinion, I believe the US law made pretty good sense prior to Sonny Bono, when it was life of the author plus fifty years, and perfectly reasonably, they would not be public domain with McCartney still breathing.