The truth doesn’t care what I think.
I knew it was coming but hoped I was just underestimating Sony. Beatallica is a hilarious band that sounds (so much it is scary) like Metallica but plays Beatles songs (or Beatles songs as if Metallica wrote them).
And then the lawyers needed to bill some hours and decided to grace Beatallica with a lot of (hopefully free) publicity by sending a C&D letter. Please go sign the Save www.beatallica.org! Petition
“request[ing] that Sony Music retract the Cease & Desist order placed on www.beatallica.org and www.beatallica.com and recognise the music of Beatallica as parody, which is legal in American law.”
It seems a well established fact that big business has no sense of humour, but it now seems it has no good sense at all.
Its sad to see the Sonys of this world responding to their perception of the problem of internet piracy with test-cases and legal gag orders on anything they find threatens their strangehold on music distribution and intellectual property rights, no matter how indirectly. Do we expect television news/comedy shows to be censored, and satire to be silenced by the people it sends up. Of course not because they wouldn’t get away with it in a medium such as television and a savage news media (at least in the UK anyway) where ownership is more diverse. Sony is just the schoolyard bully who wants his way.
Well done guys, if you work really hard maybe you can alienate everyone by treating Beatallica and their fans, the same people who buy music from corporations like yourself, with contempt.
Projects like Beatallica raise awareness of bands back catalogues and generate further revenues. Have you guys at Sony even heard of viral advertising?