A hard day’s night: Norwegian Beatles podcast yanked
The rumors are true, the Beatles have fled Norway. NRK, the Norwegian public broadcasting company, had to pull all 212 episodes of its podcast “Our Daily Beatles” last night. The free podcasts, which we discovered on Monday, included anecdotes behind the songs and offered the original Beatles tunes in their entirety.
NRK’s agreement with Norwegian composer rights holder TONO, which deals with composers, permits NRK to publish TV and radio programs that aired a long time ago — in particular, programs with less than 70 percent music content.
However, NRK’s April 2008 agreement with International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI), which owns the rights to international labels, only allows them to podcast shows for four weeks after original broadcast. The epic Beatles podcast aired in 2007 doesn’t qualify under the agreement and must sadly be removed. Record label EMI still owns the rights to license Beatles recordings, and IFPI was acting on behalf of the label. Now would be a good time for ex-Beatle Paul McCartney to discover some influential Norwegian relative.
Unless The Beatles’ Apple Corps holding company gets tired of litigation (and it hasn’t, after stalled negotiations with the other Apple of yogurt-loving Steve Jobs and EMI), NRK has no choice but to take down the podcasts, keep calm and carry on.
This dilemma is entirely fixable, in my opinion, if you have a DeLorean time machine and flux capacitor. As readers have pointed out, there’s always BitTorrent (if you want to run for your life from the RIAA) and those archaic things call CDs, if you find record players and vinyl too bulky to carry around.
The long and winding road to bringing the Beatles legally to the internet continues.
Next Story: Details about Google’s layoffs — actually, no, none
Previous Story: Angelsoft: Startup valuations declined 25 percent in Q4
