eldavojohn's Journal: The Music Service Oddity that is BlueBeat.com

Back in 2007, Slashdot covered a story about Media Rights Technology suing everyone for not implementing DRM. Ha ha, weird right? Okay, fast forward to today and it looks like BlueBeat.com (owned by MRT) is under a lot of fire for selling Beatles tunes and I'll bet EMI is having a field day with that. Most interesting about that is that "The ID3 tags of the Beatles songs sold on BlueBeat.com list âoe2009 BlueBeat.comâ as the copyright holder." Okay, that's another topic entirely.

My question is simple though ... what is going on with BlueBeat.com? BlueBeat offers a large selection of MP3s for 25 cents (only 160 kbps though) and you can stream entire albums as many times as you want on their site. So I began my investigative googling looking for MRT to be owned by someone in Germany or Russia and to be completely illegal in the US. But it seems to be a legit operation out of Santa Cruz, CA. So what gives? I mean, BlueBeat has the same crazy terms of service that iTunes does which they can change at anytime but there are so many things wrong with this picture:

1. A music service undercutting everyone else by 75%.
2. A DRM-less product from a company that initially sued everyone for not using DRM -- a company called Media Rights Technology!
3. You can stream whatever you want from the site, whole albums or songs!
4. The company doing this is in the United States of America. Where individuals are fined to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars for sharing songs. What then, does BlueBeat imagine will happen to them legally?

So what am I missing here? Has MRT lost it? Is this a marketing tactic where they receive a DMCA take down, adhere to it and send e-mails to users asking them to delete their MP3s as their ToS says they can do? And from there just keep hosting songs that labels are too lazy to DMCA away? Something stinks but if you bought 100 songs for 25 dollars from BlueBeat and then kept using them, who would be breaking the law? You or BlueBeat?

Here's your answer

[shmert]

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2009/11/judge-hits-beatles-mp3-seller-with-restraining-order.ars [arstechnica.com]

Apart from the psycho-acoustic simulation, BlueBeat also appeared to be making the claim that because it embedded image files in the music downloads, they somehow became totally new "audio-visual works." Indeed, BlueBeat claimed to own the copyright on these works.

25 cents per track?

[nullchar]

I just browsed some Classical and Electronic songs, and the 'buy' links only showed "Buy on iTunes" or "Buy on Amazon". I didn't see any direct sales for the 4 albums I looked at.

I also didn't sign up for an account, but you can stream playlists without an account.