A website dumb enough to sell the Beatles entire music catalog without their legal consent, insists they had every right to do so as a result of a new recording technique dubbed “psycho-acoustic simulation”.
An injunction against Bluebeat.com was filed by music giant EMI, after they discovered digital copies of every Beatles album had surfaced on the defendant’s website.
However, owner Hank Risan argued that the mp3s sold on his website were not EMI produced recordings, but rather files that had been remastered to sound exactly like the originals.
In other words, the single laziest legal defense ever uttered in a courtroom.
“They’re hosed. That just doesn’t make any sense,” Copyright Attorney Scott Mackenzie told Wired during an interview. “I don’t even see the basis of their theory.”
Sure enough, the judge ignored the almost laughable defense and ordered the immediate halt of all sales.
The Santa Cruz based company will also likely have to pay millions of dollars in damages and copyright infringement fines.
Not ones to let a history of incompetence and unmitigated failure get in the way of another terrible idea, Sony, EMI, Universal, and Warner Music Group, will attempt to take on iTunes dominance in the music distribution arena with their own harebrained digital format dubbed CDX.
It seems good taste wasn’t the only casualty of the ongoing downfall of the music industry, as the Times Online reports that recording studios are no longer the gatekeepers of creativity they once were.