EMI Buys Some Expensive Love from Beatles Breaching Website

Santa Cruz bazed Media Rights Technologies (MRT), a company founded by theoretical mathematics whiz and Mark Twain memorabilia collector Hank Risan, has been hit with a whopping Beatles bill.

A court has ruled that the company’ subsidiary BlueBeat.com was in clear copyright violation for selling remastered Fab Four songs online at 25 cents a pop, before they were legally available anywhere. As a result, MRT has agreed to pay $950,000 in damages. Jacqui Cheng at Wired revisits Risan’s misguided rationale:

MRT claimed it was not violating any copyrights, because it actually controlled the copyrights for the music it sells.

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