The quaint anachronistic battle to make Beatles songs available online legally (as opposed to the way I got them - all of them) has been dealt another blow in the last few days, as Bluebeat.com has been stopped from distributing songs for a quarter apiece.
Bluebeat's owner, Hank Risan, has claimed he does not need to license the music as the service is selling re-recorded versions of the songs using a technology called "psycho-acoustic simulation".As utterly convincing as this technical argument is, it hasn't been enough to stop the injunction. The Beatles are offline again until November 20th, when lawyers from both sides will attempt to bamboozle a judge into seeing their point of view. Meanwhile, the Fab Four are losing money by not participating in the paid download arena. Not that they (the corporate entity which represents the Beatles, obviously) need the money.
He argues it enables him to sell music that sounds identical to recordings, making it exempt under a section of the Copyright Act which applies to recordings that "imitate or simulate those in the copyrighted sound recording".
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