Robert Pattinson NOT Playing Kurt Cobain

Apparently the rumors of Twilight star Robert Pattinson playing legendary Nirvana frontman Kurt Cobain in a biopic are false. Thank god. I would've begun slitting my wrists immediately had it been true.

Image from EW.com; Image Credit: Janet Mayer/PR Photos; Jeff Kravitz/FilmMagic.

How (Not) To Sell Beatles MP3s, Part 2

I previously talked about a bizarre story about a company named BlueBeat selling Beatles MP3s for 25 cents each. Today, shortly after the matter went to court, the judge issued a summary beatdown by making a permanent injunction, saying:

Defendants deliberately obfuscate them, relying on technobabble and doublespeak rather than evidence or legal authority… If there were any remaining doubt, it is put to rest by the testimony of Plaintiffs' head of technology, who confirmed that the digital files being distributed and publicly performed by Defendants are copies of Plaintiff's recordings, with only minor technical variations consistent with the process by which recordings are compressed into (i.e., copied into) digital MP3 files.

Let it be known now that the mere process of recording an MP3 does not constitute a new work, even in the eyes of the court. Although no decisions have been made yet, this is surely a sign of the final verdict by the judge.

How (Not) To Sell Beatles MP3s

A few days ago, a relatively unknown company named BlueBeat popped up and started streaming and selling Beatles MP3s online for 25 cents each. This caught the attention of many people for a number of reasons: for one, there is no legal way of getting Beatles music in digital format. Also... BlueBeat does not own any Beatles music. Yet they claimed they were doing something completely legal.

Today, we learned about BlueBeat's bizarre legal defense, summarized here by ArsTechnica:

Risan is making the claim that he has created a new "audio-visual work" from the original sound recordings by running them through some sort of "psycho-acoustical" model and adding some artist pictures into the MP3 file.

BlueBeat argues that this constitutes a whole new recording and therefore is an original work. Since they own the rights to it, they can sell it legally.

It remains unclear if making an MP3 alone is good enough to constitute a "psycho-acoustical model", or if they ran the music through some additional filter.