EMI Sues BlueBeat for Selling Beatles Tunes Online
Found on Wired on Tuesday, 03 November 2009
The Beatles catalog, including dozens of the top pop songs ever recorded, has famously never been licensed for sale as digital downloads.
The entire catalog of stereo Beatles albums will soon be legitimately available in digital, albeit physical, form.
The complaint, which is not yet available through the court website, accuses the defendant of "copyright infringement and misappropriation of pre-1972 sound recordings."
It's quite a statement - especially the 24-bit depth of the lossless files, which allows more gradations between volume levels than standard 16-bit (CD-quality) audio files. The only catch - they cost $280.
What, $20 for a digital copy? 24-bit FLAC or not, I doubt you get a whopping perfect quality from pre-1972 recordings. Most people don't hear a difference between a lossless recording and a 128kB MP3 version. Except for some audiophiles (who most likely also wouldn't hear much of a difference), nobody has a real use for such a release. Especially since most users will convert them to MP3 to put them on their favorite MP3 player.