The Beatles and Their Antipiracy Request
The Beatles sell their music on 30,000 apple-shaped USB drives in FLAC 44.1KHz 24bit—higher than 16-bit CD quality—and 320Kbps MP3 files but worry about illegal file sharing
Earlier this month we reported about digital music store BlueBeat being sued by EMI for releasing Beatles songs as Mp3s without a license. Since then the big record label has triumphed in court against the US site and all the matter is now water under the bridge but another issue is yet to be cleared – what exactly keeps The Beatles music unavailable over the big net?
ArsTechnica has took on answering this question – founded in January 1968 by The Beatles themselves, Apple Corps Ltd. is the multimedia corporation that owns currently the band’s songs. So far the company has not accepted any deal that has been proposed by labels including EMI as they failed to meet its conditions.
What conditions are those, you ask? – Well, it seems that illegal downloading is a major issue for the surviving Beatles as they don’t want to give up their demand for compensation in case their music gets to p2p file sharing sites; on the other hand, who wants to take the risk of having to pay The Beatles for all the times one of their tracks leaks on BitTorrent, especially since leading vendors such as iTunes and Amazon offer at this time non-encrypted MP3 and AAC files.
Here’s an interview with Paul McCartney (given a few months back) posted by ArsTechnica which says “it helps to know that EMI was acquired by private equity firm Terra Firma a few years back, and the group installed Guy Hands as EMI's chief executive.”
I met Guy Hands on a plane once. His crew bought EMI. I refer to them as Terracotta but I believe it's Terra Firma. I said: 'What is the problem? I want to do it, we all want to do it.' And he explained that in the deal that we want, they feel exposed. If [digitised Beatles music] gets out, if one employee decides to take it home and wap it on to the internet, we would have the right to say, 'Now you recompense us for that.' And they're scared of that.
This ‘insurance’ against piracy is at least awkward if one takes a second to think further – as ArsTechnica points out, The Beatles music has been available on CDs for years (newly remastered versions that just appeared in stores) at a better-quality than the one offered by the aforementioned online music vendors, and it has reached, as expected, the p2p networks because, of course as soon as they’ve bought the albums, file sharers have made them available on the Web. So why the big fuss over piracy then?!
Oh, this concern over not losing any money – it kind of gets the best of us, doesn’t McCartney?
