Recently I wrote about BlueBeat, a Website that was not only selling MP3 downloads of The Beatles (something the Fab Four doesn’t yet allow, although you will be able to buy an apple-shaped USB drive with the remastered catalog soon), but also selling music in general for the cut-rate price of 25 cents a track. Something seemed fishy.
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As Ars Technica reports, Media Rights Technologies (MRT), the company behind BlueBeat, has a very reasonable explanation for why what it’s doing is legal. You see, according to MRT’s co-founder and CEO Hank Risan, the songs BlueBeat is selling are in fact his original creations.
How’s that, you wonder? Apparently Risan told the RIAA’s general counsel Steven Marks that he authored the songs using “psycho-acoustic simulation” so they are new recordings and not subject to copyright restrictions. Well, that explains everything.
In its response in opposition to the TRO, BlueBeat’s lawyers claim that the Website is “entirely lawful and does not constitute piracy” and that the plaintiffs are not likely to succeed. Also, the plaintiffs are well aware that the defendants “developed a series of entirely new and original sounds that it allows the general public to purchase” and that “copyright protection does not extend to the independant fixation of sounds other than those conatained in their copyrighted recordings.”
Uh huh.
