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EMI Sues Beatles Usurper Off the Net
blackest_k sends along a Wired piece on EMI's successful suit to get Beatles music off the Net. Here is the judge's ruling (PDF). "A federal judge on Thursday ordered a Santa Cruz company to immediately quit selling Beatles and other music on its online site, setting aside a preposterous argument that it had copyrights on songs via a process called 'psycho-acoustic simulation.' A Los Angeles federal judge set aside arguments from Hank Risan, owner of BlueBeat and other companies named as defendants in the lawsuit EMI filed on Tuesday. His novel defense to allegations he was unlawfully selling the entire stereo Beatles catalog without permission was that he — and not EMI or the Beatles' Apple Corp — owns these sound recordings, because he re-recorded new versions of the songs using what he termed 'psycho-acoustic simulation.' Risan faces perhaps millions of dollars in damages under the Copyright Act. And copyright attorneys said his defense was laughable and carries no weight."
also known as the World's Largest Open Air Mental Institution.
P.S. Sorry, but you'll probably only get this if you've actually visited the place.
"I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismometer." -Ken Kesey
Psycho-acoustic simulation sounds like a real good pseudo-science.
It's what most of us call mp3 or m4a.
The copyright lawyers are laughing at this guy's defense, but these are the same lawyers who think that file sharing is immoral and that record companies should have the right to sue people into poverty because of a few kilobytes of uploads.
Generalize much?
The blame falls on the lurid headline over at Wired, which completely mischaracterizes the actual article. But it's Slashdot's fault for repeating it both in the headline here and in the summary.
For shame.
It's pretty yellow of EMI to submarine this guy out of the blue like that. It's going to be a hard days night for this guy in the future. Ask me why! Because! He told EMI to come and get it.
Generalize much?
never.
Is it just me, or is EMI not suing the Beatles (half of which aren't even going to show up in court), but really some fuckwad that sold illegal copies of their songs?
np: Burial - Distant Lights (Various - 5 Years Of Hyperdub (Disc 2))
"I'm not anti-anything, I'm anti-everything, it fits better." - Sole
THIS is the sort of piracy that the RIAA (and member companies) should fight against. THIS is the sort of piracy that I think any intelligent human being opposes. THIS is the sort of copyright violation that the laws were written to combat.
I actually RTFA, and Beatles music is still available in internet jukeboxes. What happened is some guy tried to twist copyright law in a foolish and illogical way, saying that resampled Beatles songs are his, and he actually registered copyrights of them. The judge PREDICTABLY and logically ruled against him. I'd have laughed him out of court.
EMI holds the real copyrights, sued, and won. The guy posting Beatles songs was clearly in the wrong. As is the summary.
The true evil here is that the Beatles' music should be in the public domain by now; they broke up in 1971, almost forty years ago. You should be able to reuse their art in your own art by now; that was, in fact, the whole purpose of giving Congress the power to write copyright law in the first place.
Free Martian Whores!
So, in your expert opinion, everyone involved is wrong?
Why not? I know the dumbing-down of the modern media urges us to think in terms of black and white concepts, but there should be room for this. EMI are obviously evil copyright trolls, and this Hank Risan is equally obviously selling copyrighted material. Shakespeare (as always) has a good line for this:
"A plague on both your houses."
Actually, the Bluebeat guys did something a bit more tricky. They compressed the music as MP3 (whch I guess is psychoacoustic simulation - after all, the MP3 was compressed by using psychoacoustic principles to reduce the data contained, producing a simulation of the original). But the trick they're using to get around copyright law was to embed images into it, turning it into an "audio-visual" work. There is a separation, because AV works (think movies) are one entity - you cannot copyright the sound part of a movie separately from the moving images part.
Of course, that defense must fail, otherwise Hollywood would be using music with aplomb instead of having to get licenses to it when they incorporate it into a movie or TV show. Many older programs are tied up from home viewing because licenses don't allow home video distribution, and are often edited to replace licensed works.
Why, why, why must people who might otherwise help argue the case that today's copyright is broken spoil their credibility with exageration and mis-statement of facts?
1 - Not every person on Earth benefits from public domain music. Some are too damned busy trying to remain alive.
2 - The Beatle's copyrights do not funnel every penny made off of sale of their music to the surviving band members.
Yes, their music should be out of copyright by now. You'd be a greater help to the cause of copyright reform that would make that happen by sticking to reality and sounding like you've thought the issue through, than by spouting off feel-good numbers that make it sound like you're wearing blinders so you can reach the conclusion you want.
The copyright lawyers are laughing at this guy's defense, but these are the same lawyers who think that file sharing is immoral and that record companies should have the right to sue people into poverty because of a few kilobytes of uploads.
I wouldn't put too much weight on what they think.
What is legal or not, and what is right or not are often completely different. These lawyers may have some rather screwy ideas about the latter, but it's their job to have a very good understanding of the former. So when the former is what's under discussion, what they think probably should carry a bit of weight.
Parent deserves to be modded up for pointing out what most people will likely miss. Psycho-acoustic simulation is the process by which audio compression techniques remove bits of audio recordings in ways that the human brain is likely not to notice. It's part of the reason MP3 files can be compressed at all.
I am scientifically inaccurate.
Dear Slashdot editors,
please slow down with the new topics, poor Anonymous Coward keeps missing his shot at first post.
Signed,
Nobody really cares about first post.
The SCO that operated in Santa Cruz is not the same SCO that sued IBM. The Santa Cruz Operation company came out with Xenix, SCO UNIX (OpenServer) and Unixware. They purchased Tarantella earlier this decade, and then sold off their Unix-related business to Caldera. As their primary business was now Tarantella, they changed names. Caldera then took over the SCO moniker eventually becoming The SCO Group. It was that company, formerly Caldera, that took on Novell, IBM, et al.
Thank you for supporting my viewpoint that copyright has been hijacked. It's meant to benefit the originators of the idea, not suits that were not even born when the songs were first created.
Actually, that's incorrect. Before copyright, there were no artists or writers clamouring for "protection". The people pushing copyright were the publishers, who wanted copyright to benefit themselves (which is exactly what we have right now.) The whole "think of the artists" stuff is propaganda invented to create support for copyright from artists and "average" people.
Before copyright, artists considered it a complement that their work was replayed and enjoyed by others.
This, of course, doesn't make the hoarding of our cultural works and the impingement on free expression right, but I just wanted to point out that it was never meant to protect artists, only publishers.
But EMI don't own the particular soundwaves which comprise the Beatles' songs. Instead they own the very idea of these songs. EMI has sole and total ownership over the platonic ideals of which any particular instance of a Beatles song is merely a shadow. This ideal encompases any sound resembling the songs, any text resembling their lyrics, any album cover resembling theirs, any musical notes close enough to a Beatles tune.
In a very real sense, EMIs ownership of this music is analogous to them owning the number 537. A platonic ideal. No matter who sings it, or performs it, or records it, or sells it, or even hums it this music belongs to EMI because they own the very idea of it. They own it now, and will probably own it in perpetuity, for the rest of eternity.
So which is crazier; this guys argument or the concept of copyrighted music itself?
May the Maths Be with you!
It was not, giving 28 year terms of copyright to a populace that would live only 35 on average.
Statistics. You fail it.
If you have 1000 people, 500 of which died before they reached one year, and 500 of which die when they're 70, what is the average life expectancy?
In that time period, most adults lived into their 60's, not mid-thirties. The "35 year lifespan" is a garbage statistic spouted by people who don't understand math.
No matter who sings it, or performs it, or records it, or sells it, or even hums it this music belongs to EMI because they own the very idea of it.
That's not entirely true. US Copyright law carves out some "compulsory licensing" exceptions that copyright holders are obligated to accept particular amounts of payment on and cannot deny permission. Web radio, for example. Mechanical reproduction for another (cover bands, etc). Which I believe may have been the exception this guy was going for, by trying to ride the fine line of what constitutes a new recording of the work. Even the makers of Guitar Hero did this (albeit in a much more legal way, by actually playing and rerecording the songs), and resulted with what sounded to the amateur as identical to the originals.
So this guy's idea wasn't necessarily *crazy*, just too close to literal duplication for this judge's taste (seems even the legal system applies some common sense now and then).