p2pnet - rss feed: Sony stomps Beatallica
p2pnet.net News:- Milwaukee’s Beatallica is grabbing headlines. But not because of its undoubted popularity.
The rock band puts its heavy metal foot to the pedal with Beatles classics. And that upset Sony which a couple of days back fired off a Cease and Desist missile, ‘ordering’ the band to take its web page down and demanding unspecified damages for recording tracks such as Hey Dude, Got to Get You Trapped Under Ice, Blackened the USSR, Sgt. Hetfield’s Motorbreath Pub Band and A Garage Dayz Nite.
This proves what you’ve known all along.
Sony, and the other members of the customer-suing Bug Musik Rekord Label Kartel, deserve only one thing - your utter contempt.
Because they sure as hell don’t deserve your money.
Want to hear what pissed Sony off?
Check these out:
Sgt Hetfield’s Motorbreath Pub Band
And don’t miss Leper Madonna which includes takes from Mz Ciccone’s WTF spoof when she larded the Net with fake mp3s supposedly ripped from her then new “American Life” album. Instead of a vocal track, downloaders got Madonna asking - “What the fuck do you think you’re doing”..
The irony is - Sony should have kept its big mouth shut.
Its C&D screw-up has generated more free publicity for Beatallica than the band could have achieved by itself - at least, not without a big budget PR campaign behind it.
But this isn’t really surprising.
Sony is a Bug Musik Rekord Label Kartel component, the others being BMG, EMI, UMG and Warner. They own the RIAA whose imbecilic lawsuits have not only done zip to stop file sharing, they’ve actually spread the word to millions of people who probably would never have otherwise learned about p2p.
For now, thanks to a Reader’s Write, you can check out the site-that-was on the WayBack Machine here.
Stay tuned.
[Revised @ 9:46 am, Pacific]
(Apology - someone told us about this before the site was yanked. Sorry we couldn’t get to it earlier.)
Something you think we should know? tips[at]p2pnet.net
March 3rd, 2005 at 5:37 pm
A year old archived copy of the Beatallica website on the Wayback machine:
http://web.archive.org/web/20040210205012/www.beatallica.org
March 4th, 2005 at 1:26 am
Good song (Sgt Hetfield’s Motorbreath Pub Band).
Sony, why don’t you just fade away. Face the facts, you sued your own customers and now they disappeared. Stop wasting your time, your products are no longer attractive. Even your Atrac3 player is questionable regarding patent infringement.
From www.mp3licensing.com
We believe that Atrac 3 uses principles like Hybrid-Filter bank, Gain Control, Huffman-Coding and Rate Loop, which means that at least a license under the following patents of Fraunhofer or Thomson is needed:
ep0287578b1 (OCF Basis: Rate Loop)
ep0612156b1 (OCF Supplement: ESC)
ep0193143b1 (Grouping of values, suppression of signal compression below thresshold)
ep0251028b1 (Masking threshold covering more than one group)
ep0277613b1 (Masking threshold in adjacent groups)
March 4th, 2005 at 4:43 am
John Lennon would have loved the parody!!!!
March 4th, 2005 at 4:29 pm
Great piece
Morg
March 4th, 2005 at 10:40 pm
Please sign a petition in favor of keeping the Beatallica website up:
http://www.petitiononline.com/p1gp0g/petition.html
They need people who favor freedom in creativity (thus a commedian’s parody) to sign it.
BTW…Thank you for bringing attention to this B.S. I can truely say I am personal friends of the band members for as much as 8 years, hanging out at shows and house parties, and have seen all of them perform legitimate “original” music with their other bands. Great guys. “Jaymz” and Dave are peaches! It makes no sense to Sony’s claims. Beatallica doesn’t earn any money. All the lyrics are changed - they are not stolen. All they want to do is be like musical-commedians. Jaymz, a good friend of mine, has spoken directly on the phone with Lars Ullrich, of Metallica. Lars has said that Metallica has no problem with Beatallica and even finds them quite funny! That is the truth.
So many big name bands even today have drawn inspiration from other musicians, that it’s just plain sick when someone thinks they can copyright a “style”. I wonder how many musicians that Sony “owns” drew inspiration from another music-company’s musicians - if so should those other music companies sue Sony for copyright infringements? Gimme a break! Should all Elvis impersonators, an understood JOKE, be sued for theft of style, material, image and money earned by Elvis’s estate? Pshaw! Should Jennifer Aniston sue anyone she sees donning her famous “Rachel” cut, her trademark? Gawd! It’s just Sony getting too big for their britches - they recently bought out BMG and the aggression-hormones are still kicking in to monopolize the music business.
People should boycott Sony.
Oh yeah - PLEASE SIGN THE PETITION!!! PRETTY PLEASE!!!