http://arstechnica.com/media/news/2009/11/beatles-piracy-fixation-gets-stranger-with-huge-flac-release.ars

“I met Guy Hands on a plane once,” said McCartney. “His crew bought EMI. I refer to them as Terracotta but I believe it’s Terra Firma. I said: ‘What is the problem? I want to do it, we all want to do it.’ And he explained that in the deal that we want, they feel exposed. If [digitised Beatles music] gets out, if one employee decides to take it home and wap it on to the internet, we would have the right to say, ‘Now you recompense us for that.’ And they’re scared of that.”

The Beatles, in other words, are demanding a guarantee against Internet leaks, or recompense if those leaks happen, as the price of doing the deal. Who knows if this is the whole story, but it’s a revealing anecdote, coming as it does right from McCartney’s lips.

What makes the antipiracy stipulation so odd is the fact that The Beatles have released their music on CD for years, including newly remastered versions that just appeared in stores. These are better-quality files than anything offered at the mainstream download shops, and P2P users “wapped it on” to the Internet immediately after the albums were released.

The whole situation sounds ridiculous, given this reality. It would be like a movie company releasing a film on an unencrypted Blu-ray disc, then balking at putting a compressed version “on the Internet” because it might be pirated. But it’s already on the Internet.

Today’s politicians live in symbiosis with the entertainment kartels: politicians are influenced by cartel money, and cartels’ product is influenced by politicians.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cinema_of_the_United_States#The_Relation_between_Hollywood_and_the_Politicians