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Norwegian podcast puts entire Beatles catalog online?legally

This may be a case of unintended consequences. The NRK, Norway's national …

UPDATE:

As expected, it was too good to last. The NRK has pulled the podcasts. Apparently, it had agreements with both TONO and the IFPI; the former allowed the podcasts, while the latter restricted podcasts to broadcasts from the last several weeks. This meant the Beatles material was too old for podcasting under the terms of the IFPI agreement.

The Norwegians, who have made a name for themselves by taking on Apple, Inc.'s music business, may have wound up picking a fight with Apple Records as well. A new agreement forged between Norway's national broadcasting service, the NRK, and TONO, the group that holds the music distribution rights in the country, has given the NRK permission to host music-focused programming as podcasts in MP3 format, provided the copyrighted music comprises less than 70 percent of the podcast. Included in the collection that has already started appearing on the NRK's site: the entire Beatles catalog.

The Norwegian government as a whole appears to take a rather liberal view of content. The Norwegian Consumer Ombudsman has pursued a case against the Apple based in Cupertino, trying to liberate the music at the iTunes store from the FairPlay DRM scheme. The NRK has also demonstrated an independent streak, making copies of one of its most popular programs available in a DRM-free format on BitTorrent, and pronouncing the experiment a rousing success.

(The NRK's technology group seems to be a bit self-consciously flippant, as the site describes its use of the mother tongue as follows: "This site is coded in an advanced codec called Norwegian. It's only readable by about 4.7 million people. So from time to time, when we have something we really would like to show the world, we decode it into English.")

All of this seems consistent with the possibility that NRK was pulling a fast one in its agreement with TONO, the country's music rights holder. TONO doesn't seem to be any more progressive than the RIAA; the front page of its English language site leads off with the text, "Are you aware of the fact that a licence fee has to be paid for all public performances of music?" A skull graphic is prominently displayed in the collection of links that runs down the left side of the page, which will take you to piracykillsmusic.no, where that skull floats over a graveyard, presumably filled with the corpses of music. It's a bit hard to tell, as the skull only speaks Norwegian.

Regardless, the clear impression one comes away with is that TONO would not be the first organization to sanction a DRM-free bonanza of music, especially music that its owners have steadfastly kept offline for years. How did this happen?

The NRK's agreement with TONO stipulates that it can post any music-free podcasts indefinitely. If the podcast contains less than 70 percent music, it can be posted for up to four weeks. Anything with over 70 percent music is apparently off-limits. 

It's possible that TONO, in forging this agreement, didn't realize that the NRK's program collection included a series recorded in 2001 that featured every Beatles song recorded. As the NRK describes it, "Each episode contains a three-minute story about each track (sadly for our international visitors—in Norwegian) and the actual Beatles tune." As of today, 14 different songs are available, but the entire collection of 212 programs will be up before January is out.

I grabbed a track (Twist and Shout, for the curious) and quickly identified the start and end times in iTunes; with that, it's a simple matter of telling the software to only play the music portion of the track. More sophisticated audio editing software would probably make the job a snap. In essence, the Beatles have leapt into the digital download arena with nothing more than a few minutes of someone speaking in Norwegian as a DRM system. The only question that seems to remain is whether the NRK has opened the Beatles' version of Pandora's box, or simply invited Apple Records' lawyers to spend the winter in Norway.

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