Do I have a right to obtain music by The Beatles in any format I want? That is the question that one needs to ask when deciding how to view the decision by the remaining Beatles and key rightsholders to rule out certain forms of digital distribution.

L. Gordon Crovitz has a nice overview of rights in the digital age in an opinion piece in today’s Wall Street Journal. (Note the WSJ, which puts much of their content behind a paywall — and more power to them — is making this piece available to non-subscribers as well.)

It’s no secret among the digirati that The Beatles haven’t made their music available for download through legal services such as iTunes. They have long embraced digital, however. Their entire archive was put onto CD decades ago; I can remember purchasing several of their albums in CD back in the mid-1980s. (The Sgt. Pepper cover art lost some of its impact in the smaller format, but the White Album translated visually just fine.) Most recently, they made waves with a dedicated “Rock Band” game.

But as Crovitz points out, they haven’t felt it appropriate to have MP3s of their work thrown in with so much other stuff at a price point some tech company sets arbitrarily. That is their choice.

A common riposte by those who believe that because something can be made available online, it must be made available online, is that The Beatles are leaving money on the table, because their tunes are easily found on infringing networks. For some, this becomes a pretzel-like rationalization for infringement.

Perhaps The Beatles feel that the folks who would download their tunes from a torrent service are not the folks most likely to actually spend money on their music; after all, there are plenty of ways to obtain their music legally and digitally.

The reason for Crovitz’s post is a stunt pulled recently by a company no one had ever heard of, that was selling Beatles downloads for 25 cents and streaming them. That anyone thought this might have been licensed is laughable. That they thought anyone would buy their “psycho-acoustic simulation” infringement defense was, well, psycho. But this outfit, which I won’t name, now has a law suit on its hands, but more publicity than it ever could have bought, including big play in the Journal.

It’s easy for us to see what the Internet is capable of, and feel everything we want should be available there, in a manner that works best for us, at a price point we think is appropriate. It’s easy to think that way, and it’s also a wee bit silly.

We have so much more available to us legally now than we did ten years ago, five years ago, one year ago. It will be stunning how much more we have available legally one year from now, five years from now, ten years from now.

But at the end of the day, rightsholders are in the best position to decide what they release, in what format, in what venue, and with what rights transferred. There are many “rights” that are worth championing, but the “right” to someone else’s creativity on your own terms is not a “right” at all.

(Additional note: I am proud that I resisted all temptation to incorporate Beatles’ song titles and lyrics in this article. But I could never reach the high-water mark in that approach achieved by the creators of The Powerpuff Girls. Their “Meet The Beat-Alls” episode pulled off an entire episode constructed of such lines. The writing is sublime, and the “Yoko Ono” character is to die for.)

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This entry was posted on Monday, November 9th, 2009 at 4:11 pm by Patrick Ross and is filed under copyright opponents, creators, internet, p2p, property rights. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.