Despite the untold amounts of money Sir Paul McCartney could make from releasing the entire Beatles catalog via digital distribution, he continues to resist the urge to capitalize on the mp3 craze sweeping this nation, out of fear his life’s work might find its way onto the Internets. Wait, what?
During a recent interview with British newspaper The Guardian, McCartney claimed the only thing holding back a Beatles digital renaissance is the all too real potential for internet piracy and retaliatory lawsuits.
“I met [EMI’s chief executive] on a plane once. I said: ‘What is the problem? I want to do it, we all want to do it,’” he said. “And he explained that in the deal that we want, they feel exposed. If [digitized Beatles music] gets out, if one employee decides to take it home and wap it on the internet, we would have the right to say, ‘Now you recompense us for that.’ And they’re scared of that.”
According to technology blog Gizmodo, McCartney is particularly frightened by a potential leak of digital masters, which would give criminals and thieves (you know, internet users) full access to the Beatles’ recordings.
“I don’t know how much you’ve read about the making of [The Beatles: Rock Band], but they went to incredible lengths to protect the masters,” an anonymous source allegedly said. “It was only towards the end of the project that Harmonix received the (heavily encrypted) music they needed; before then, Apple Corps had been sending ‘dirtied-up’ copies of the music just in case it was intercepted halfway.”
However, the whole thing still sounds a bit preposterous, especially when you account for the fact that Beatles songs have been circulating the World Wide Web since its creation in 1958 by former Vice President Al Gore (who was approximately 10 years old at the time).
