Beatles music website agrees to pay $1m damages

An American website has settled a court case in which it was accused of selling Beatles songs without permission.

The Bluebeat site was selling tracks by the band for 25 cents (17p) each, along with music by Coldplay and other bands. It continued to do so until it was sued in 2009.

According to the BBC, it sold more than 67,000 Beatles songs. The company denied that it was doing anything wrong, saying that its owner Hank Risan had invented a technique called 'psycho-acoustic simulation' which allowed it to make unique copies of the songs that were not the same as the originals.

At the time Risan told Fast Company magazine that each track he was selling was an "entirely different sound recording" to the original. He would buy a copy of each track, analyse it and "using psycho-acoustic synthetic methods, synthesize a new sound recording in a new 3D environment.

"Instead of bringing a bunch of guys in that look like The Beatles and sound like The Beatles into a conventional recording studio, we do this all in a virtual 3D environment."

However, judge Josephine Tucker took a dim view of this assertion, saying that Bluebeat had violated The Beatles' copyright, saying it was "obscure and undefined pseudo-scientific language that appears to be a long-winded way of describing 'sampling'."

The remaining Beatles have long held out from offering their music for general sale, similarly to how permission is rarely given for Beatles tracks to  be used in television shows or films.

Apple Computer and the Beatles' record label Apple Corps were involved in a 19-year legal battle over the naming of the computer company, but after that was settled Beatles songs appeared on Apple's iTunes download service in 2010.