• by Wendy Davis , Staff Writer @wendyndavis, November 6, 2009

Music fans often lament that Apple Corps. has so far refused to allow Beatles songs to be sold as digital downloads. So when BlueBeat.com started offering downloads of Beatles tracks last week, observers immediately wondered how the site could have secured the rights to the tracks.

The answer soon emerged: BlueBeat didn't own the rights to the catalog. Instead, the company said it used "psycho-acoustic simulation" to rerecord the originals. BlueBeat claimed that this process resulted in new recordings -- and that it owned the copyright to them.

BlueBeat was so enamored of this theory that CEO Hank Risan outlined it in an email sent Monday to Recording Industry Association of America executive vice president Steve Marks. "I authored the sound recordings that are being used by psycho-acoustic simulation," Risan wrote.

Marks asked Risan to define psycho-acoustic simulation, spurring the reply: "Psychoacoustic simulations are my synthetic creation of that series of sounds which best expresses the way I believe a particular melody should be heard as a live performance."

Unimpressed with this mumbo-jumbo, EMI sued on Tuesday for copyright infringement. The record label argued that BlueBeat not only sold Beatles' tracks without authorization, but apparently also offered pirated versions of "tens of thousands" of other EMI tracks.

"Put simply, defendants are engaged in music piracy of the most blatant kind," EMI wrote in papers filed in federal district court in Los Angeles.

Judge John Walker agreed. On Thursday he issued a temporary restraining order requiring BlueBeat to stop selling copyrighted tracks and to destroy any copies of them. The next court date is Nov. 20.