Sony Vs Beatallica, Freedom and Creativity

Another example of the media industry's desire to stifle the world of creativity outside of its direct control exists with what's going on between a rather talented parody band called Beatallica and the media moguls at the Sony Corporation.

Formed in 2001 as a one-off Metallica tribute for a local festival, Beatallica came up with the idea of combining Beatles songs with Metallica's heavy-metal format and ended up recording and releasing around two album's worth of material for download. The Internet-word soon spread and Beatallica gained numerous fans around the world, all of which upset Sony Music who have now ordered Beatallica to Cease & Desist while seeking simultaneously to claim compensation for infringement of Beatles copyrights.

Luckily, the Internet is a long way from the passive market of consumers which Sony is used to manipulating and you can still download the excellent Beatallica tracks from metafilter.com, with lyrics available from lyrics-songs.com. Given that Beatallica have made their music freely available, there shouldn't be any problems with downloading it from your friendly file sharing network either.

While you're enjoying Beatallica's talents, do the world of freedom, innovation and creativity a favour, join the other 10,000 or so people with a sense of reason, and go now and sign the online petition requesting Sony to retract their Cease and Desist order against beatallica.org and beatallica.com (both of which, at the time of writing, were offline thanks to Sony's actions, unlike Beatallica's messageboard).

The case is still ongoing and Metallica's Lars Ulrich recently got involved offering Beatallica his support. Mr Ulrich is famous for his role as drummer in Metallica, and a little more famous in some circles for being the chief Anti-Napster spokesman in the Napster witch-hunts of yester-year. This is before Metallica realised the error of their ways, did a complete U-turn, and began releasing Metallica material for download, so who knows quite what's going to happen next.

Update: I just found All Along The Blog Tower which promises, "All Beatallica. All the time. At least until Sony sues me" which includes, amongst other things, an amusing list of possible titles for songs on Beatallica's next album. Dude, dude, let's hope we don't get sued...