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Digital Legal
BlueBeat settles for a million
By CMU Editorial | Published on Tuesday 29 March 2011
BlueBeat.com, the US website that sold unlicensed downloads for 25 cents each, including The Beatles catalogue, and which claimed it didn’t need licences because the digital files it sold had been resimulated, or something like that (it was one of the more original excuses), has agreed to pay EMI a million in damages to settle a lawsuit.
As previously reported, the low price download store came to wider attention when MusicAlly noticed that among the EMI tracks being sold by the service was The Beatles catalogue, then not available legitimately anywhere on the internet. EMI quickly sued, which led to the “psycho-acoustic simulation” defence being offered. It never worked well in court, with a US judge ruling BlueBeat.com was guilty of copyright infringement last December. The million dollar settlement is as a result of that ruling.
BlueBeat.com’s legal man Archie Robinson said that he thought his client had done well to keep the damages payment as low as a million, adding that it was a “fraction” of what EMI US had originally demanded. The final settlement, he said, was “an acknowledgement on their part that they don’t have the damages they claimed”.
BlueBeat.com continues to operate as a licensed (I think) streaming service.
