The Beatles on Apple iTunes

A Web site that brazenly sold digital copies of Beatles songs last year has been found guilty of copyright infringement. A California district judge also found BlueBeat guilty of misappropriation, unfair competition, and conversion.

No matter how you try to explain it, "BlueBeat's Web site offered for download, without authorization, the copyrighted recordings, albeit through 'audio-visual displays and simulations,' and ... users downloaded the copyrighted recordings," Judge Josephine Station Tucker wrote in her Wednesday decision.

The case dates back to 2009 when EMI sued BlueBeat after it was discovered that the site was streaming and selling its content, including the Beatles collection, as well as artists like the Beastie Boys, Coldplay, Pink Floyd, Radiohead, and Smashing Pumpkins. At that time, the Beatles collection had not yet been released in a digital format, making the move all the more surprising.

In November 2009, a judge issued a preliminary injunction against BlueBeat, which banned it from directly or indirectly infringing on any content owned by EMI or its record labels pending trial. Wednesday decision from Judge Tucker addressed the larger issues, particularly copyright infringement.

In an objection last year, BlueBeat founder Hank Risan argued last year that he had developed a "psychoacoustic process" that creates sounds that simulate but are different from EMI's copyrighted sound recordings. Essentially, Risan said that the recordings on BlueBeat were his own, even if they sounded exactly like the Beatles.

Judge Tucker didn't buy it. "BlueBeat fails to provide any evidence, however, showing how or why its purported 'simulations' are anything but illicit copies of the copyrighted recordings," she wrote. "Risan's obscure and undefined pseudo-scientific language appears to be a long-winded way of describing 'sampling,' i.e. copying, and fails to provide any concrete evidence of independent creation."

She pointed to testimony from Risan in which he "confirmed that BlueBeat's simulations can only be made using the original songs from the CDs."

The ruling comes about a month after Apple announced that it would finally make the Beatles collection available on iTunes after a lengthy battle with Apple Corps, which owns the rights to the Beatles collection in conjunction with EMI.