/ Cory Doctorow / 7:32 am Tue Jan 6, 2009

Legal Beatles MP3 archive goes dark

NRK, the Norwegian public broadcaster, has had to pull its legal MP3 archive of all 212 Beatles songs. Turns out the agreement they had with the local rights society didn't mean what they thought it meant.
Our new agreement with rights holder TONO gives us rights to publish radio and TV shows we aired a long time ago. But the agreement NRK has with rights holders IFPI and FONO only allows us to publish shows that has been aired the last four weeks. And since “Our daily Beatles” was aired in 2007, we have to pull it from the podcast (see below for details about the agreements).
NRK pulls “Our daily Beatles” podcast because of rights (Thanks, Oyvind!)

Previously:

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  2. oops. I thought the original post sounded a bit too good to be true. I read it and my first reaction was “…. really???”

  3. The Beatles are kind of an archetype of baby-boomers and their cultural hypocrisy — at least in the USA and perhaps also UK / Europe.

    They rose to massive popularity due to their music as the “background score” for an entire counter-cultural movement speaking about peace, love, and recreational drugs. But then once the money flowed in, they took all their money offshore and became authoritarian about who will be permitted to hear their aging music catalogue.

    I wonder if or when the remaining Beatles had their “I’ve become my father!” moment.

    Or, I’m sure someone more keen on the Beatles than I can make a comparison between their steadfast refusal towards online music distribution and the Blue Meanies keeping their realm silent.

  4. Read the EULA carefully it would seem to be saying.

    Thing is I don’t understand why the radio station was offering Beatles tracks in the first place. I mean why not offer hard to get stuff, like old John Peel sessions? Doesn’t every Beatles fan already have a Beatles cd/mp3 collection? Or is it just a “Oops! I find my self sitting in a Starbucks wi-fi hot spot with my friends laptop and/or forgot to load up iPod/iTunes with my fave tracks, and now I can’t kind of thing?

  5. The sneaky option here would be for the station to program one night of all of the three minute segments, every few weeks, thus making them perpetual “recent programs,” and thereby downloadable.

  7. @#3

    I’m no knee-jerk Beatles fan, but you are making a big leap. The Beatles didn’t make themselves spokespeople for “an entire counter-cultural movement speaking about peace, love, and recreational drugs,” their fans and the media did. Did they use that position to promote themselves and their ideas? Sure, but when did they agree to relinquish the right to use the fruits of their labor any way they want, within the confines of the law?

    I don’t understand the sense of entitlement people have when it comes to their entertainment icons, like “we made you famous, so you owe us.” I think it’s swell when rich artists give away their work to the masses, just for the heck of it, but they certainly shouldn’t be obligated or pressured to do so.

    What’s so bad about buying a Beatles album for $15 and enjoying it for the rest of your life? Seems like a fair transaction.

  8. Zuzu is confusing the Beatles with the San Francisco music scene.

    The Beatles predate the counter culture by 3 years. The San Francisco bands are part of that counter culture.

  9. @BingoTheChimp
    because the owners of the media are looking for that magic combination of barbed wire and railways which makes it feasible to start over-enforcing ownership claims on intellectual property?

    That’s the future. The path that data mongerer’s want you to take, where you don’t actually ‘buy’ a product any more, you are leased the conditional use of it.

    And don’t imagine that Black Bart and his gang of thieves pay rolled by the railways to force ranchers off their land is a tired plot line for westerns with John Wayne. Was it before or after Michael Jackson bought up most of the back catalogue of the Beatles, that he was involved in expensive lawsuits that helped deprive him of his capital?

    Somebody had muscle and influence with the local sherrif, ya-all.

  10. That’s a bit of a shame. I don’t have a problem with paying for Beatles albums, I just wish I could get them in native mp3 format. Surely it’s about time that the copyright holders start releasing them digitally, they’re almost guaranteed to make a bomb.

  12. @#7

    Depends what you consider “over-enforcing ownership claims on intellectual property.” I think it’s reasonable for a sound-recording owner to distribute that recording according to his/her best judgement — no more, no less.

    I’m not making any grand pronouncement about dealing with intellectual property in the digital age — that’s a complicated issue, but this instance I think is pretty clear-cut. If I write and record a song, it’s up to me to make it available via the format of my choice, or sit on it till the copyright expires. Same goes for the Beatles, regardless of whether we agree with the business wisdom of doing so.

    I don’t follow your point re Jacko, but his deal was for Publishing, not sound-recordings, They are a different animal in copyright law.

  14. Seems a bit pointless, considering how many hits ‘beatles+FLAC+torrent’ will get you. Not that that’s news, of course.

  15. over enforcing would mean exactly what I said – you are looking at a cd, or a tape, whatever as a product. It’s not, it’s the package. You own the package, but you do not own the content.

    Back in the day, people weren’t supposed to make their own tapes of records, or tape off the radio, but it was generally ignored. However if you started making copious quantities and selling them on street corners, then the police would arrest you.

    The point being people are now pushing for the right to do what they want with the content of the package (ie make copies and share with their friends, just like their parents did with tapes) rather than pay for the conditioned use of the content. I’m not arguing that everything should be free, but if you buy a painting by Van Gough you CAN take photos of it and post them on the net. You OWN the content not just the picture frame. If you buy a crappy repro of a Van Gough print, the owner of the original owns the right to copy, but will they mind if you put a scan of it on your web page for anyone to copy? Loop back to the bit about home taping. The de-facto use of the law is to punish commercial piracy, a very different beast from “Two Cartoon Puppies with Sad Eyes” on S. Palin’s geocities web page.

    The de facto part is what used to change laws under the English legal system allowing laws to be modified to keep up with current use, as opposed to the Roman legal system which requires ratified amendments to the laws by qualified operatives, allowing for a more responsive and flexible legal system. These changes were referred to as common law for example common law spouses, whereby after a couple lived together for a specified period of time they were considered de facto married, just not ratified by the state or government. There are some shades of this in property law in the US where de facto land ownership is conferred to someone person using land for a given period of time. This is the crux – by not prosecuting all abuses of copyright and turning a blind eye in the past, the music industry has set up a de facto use which they’re now trying to question.

    re MJ he’s got something people in the digital land grab want – how may Beatles covers are playing at one time anywhere in the world? Even if the musicians bought the sheet music they have to pay to perform it, or have I got that twisted?

  16. @#10 strumpet windsock:

    That link you posted doesn’t say what you claim it says. In fact, the author of the piece doesn’t even believe that there was a spoiler signal on the Sgt. Pepper’s LP.

  17. @#12

    re MJ he’s got something people in the digital land grab want – how may Beatles covers are playing at one time anywhere in the world? Even if the musicians bought the sheet music they have to pay to perform it, or have I got that twisted?

    That’s sort of correct — the performer per se does not pay, the venue pays into an ASCAP or BMI fund. I don’t get what that has to do with the topic, ie: Beatles recordings available as free mp3s, but maybe I need more coffee…

    Anyway, the examples you cite are fair use by consumers (granted, the definition of “fair use” is subject to debate), while the article is about a commercial use. Just because the NKR wasn’t charging for the content, doesn’t mean it’s not a commercial use. They are a commercial entity, a business, an institution, etc. It’s the same as your example of “making copious quantities and selling them on street corners,” except no money is changing hands. It’s still a mass-distribution of someone else’s property — not your physical copy of a recording, but the intellectual property contained therein.

    Your position seems to be more about DRM than about controlling channels of distribution. I totally agree that once you purchase a CD, mp3, whatever, it is owned by you to do as you see fit, within fair use. I don’t agree that anyone should be required to make their mp3, CD, whatever product available to consumers for sale, for free, whatever, if they don’t feel like it.

  18. For confirmed nutters, such as myself, who already have all this material several times over on disk, hard drives and my iPod there is still a palpable glee in rushing to some new source and exercising the opportunity to access files. It’s definitely pathological. And whenever a barrier is encountered the pathological file collector will waste inordinate amounts of time seeking ways to get around any restrictions. I guess it’s like train spotting or squeezing zits.

    Anyway – they only had 13 episodes online, with the other 200 pending.

    And anyway – they only removed their links to the podcast files – not the podcasts themselves.

    And – for now anyway – you can find links to those files here:

    http://www.millsworks.net/beatlespodcasts

    I don’t understand Norwegian but the episodes I’ve listened to sounded like a brisk, entertaining and informative look at each individual song. And the music’s good too.

    Cheers.

  19. @BingoTheChimp
    then basically we agree, except I’m suggesting the Music/Film industry is hoping to have even more controls over what we can and can’t currently do in the future. Take the BBC for example, it allows its programmes to be downloaded but becoming unplayable after a set amount of time. The BBC is paid for through a public licence fee, that doesn’t stop them packaging the same programmes onto DVD. So people are technically paying twice, once through the licence fee and once for the DVD. It’s very lucrative.

    However, now they’re in a quandary, they had a policy in the 70s of wiping masters, so their archives of sought after classics no longer have anything to release on DVD. Except for ‘found’ copies, often clear cases of piracy, which they are graciously accepted from it’s ‘current’ owner, with no apparent remuneration for the storage fees incurred.

  21. @#15

    Yeah, the industry trends are definitely bad news for legitimate ownership of your digital purchases. Pretty soon, your Happy Meal will come with a EULA.

    Anyway, LPs sound better….

    :)

  24. …Despite all the various finger pointing to the actual culprits in this mess, I still can’t help but smell Yoko Ono in the middle.

  26. A User @15: I’m not arguing that everything should be free, but if you buy a painting by Van Gough you CAN take photos of it and post them on the net. You OWN the content not just the picture frame.

    Well, that’s because Van Gogh is long dead and out of copyright. If you buy a painting by a current artist, you do not get the right to make reproductions of it under current copyright law. (Unless the artist sells you the copyright, or licenses it to you, or something. But that has to be spelled out explicitly in the sale.)

  27. @Avram

    they why is it museums and galeries can make postcards of their exhibits copyrighted to them?

  28. Bummer! I was actually looking forward to the commentary. As an expatriate dane I’m pretty confident that I would’ve been able to parse the norwegian speech.

    Oh well… I guess I’ll just go reread “A Hard Day’s Write”.

    Besides, why would I want free mp3s of the songs anyway? I already own almost all of them on cassette tape and vinyl… [quietly sobs]

  30. @#15 by a_user

    This is actually still legal in Norway (or at least last time I checked, they might have changed it since). The definition is a bit vague, but making a copy for private use, even to give to friends or family is (or was until recently) totally legal.

  31. Probably nobody is going to read this after five days, but for the record:

    Robbo points to http://www.millsworks.net/beatlespodcasts where they have 13 links to the files that were in the podcast.

    Here they have no less than 28:
    http://blogs.fd.nl/crumbs/2009/01/internet-vand-2.html
    All 28 files appear to be downloadable.

    But of course, as has been pointed out, if you’re downloading illegal files anyway, why not go for a torrent of the Beatles’ complete works, without Norwegian gobbledegook?

  32. Well whatever. It’s not sold online, and months ago I downloaded a torrent of the entire Beatles anthology. Their loss not mine.

    I hadn’t heard most of the songs before. It’s really great…

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