Meet The Psycho-Acoustic Beatles

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The era of psycho-acoustic simulation is over. I know, I know; you weren’t even aware that it had begun.

The term referred to the legal defense offered by a website called BlueBeat.com, which claimed that it was able to sell Beatles tracks online (for just 25 cents) because it was actually selling “simulations” of the original songs, created after studying a copy of the original, which was then destroyed – a complicated workaround that, the site claimed, protected the sales under 17 U.S.C. § 114(b), which allows the “making or duplication of another sound recording that consists entirely of an independent fixation of other sounds, even though such sounds imitate or simulate those in the copyrighted sound recording.”

Thankfully, last week, common sense stepped in in the form of federal judge Josephine Staton Tucker, who ruled that “obscure and undefined psuedo-scientific language” can’t disguise the fact that these simulations were simply copies of the original material. Or, as she put it:

BlueBeat fails to provide any evidence…showing how or why its purported ‘simulations’ are anything but illicit copies of the Copyrighted Recordings.

Clearly, there’s only one thing left to do for BlueBeat: Release the psycho-acoustic technology to everyone, so that we can realize that it’s not just sampling (at best), and create our own psycho-acoustic music in response. It’s the only way to avoid prosecution for illegally selling copyrighted material – and it just may usher in a new musical age of psycho-acoustic Aquarius.

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