Beatles face the music as Apple's iTunes prevail

Net Results: It's been a long and winding road of litigation, but now the legal eagles should just let it be because iTunes is nothing to get hung about.

Ah, yes, the press coverage of the Beatles music label's Apple Corps versus Apple Computer battle in the courts, which reached a verdict this week, offered up irresistible opportunities to inject more Beatles references than you'd stumble across in an Oasis song.

For now, the courts have found in favour of Apple Computer, with a London judge determining that Apple Computer's music sales through its iTunes online store did not violate a 1991 agreement between the two Apples that the computer company would not get into distributing music.

The judge ruled that Apple wasn't violating this agreement because it wasn't the actual source of the music - the record companies were. It was merely acting as a shop to sell the data content created and distributed by others.

I suspect that, with the remaining Beatles' deep pockets, this view of things may end up back in the courts on appeal.

The case is extremely interesting on a number of levels, though. One imagines that everyone felt satisfied with the agreement back in 1991, when the notion that a computer manufacturer would want to sell music seemed as far-fetched as one of my best childhood friends choosing Ringo as her favourite ex-Beatle, back in the days when such topics were intently debated by preteens and teens (and probably quite a few women over the then-ancient age of 20).

Even by the mid-1990s, music distribution over the internet was - like the notion of using a mobile phone to access the internet or play a game - so exotic as to seem more Tomorrow's World than today's revenue stream.

Now, of course, everyone from grannies to five year olds happily downloads music and the iPod is as ubiquitous as the cassette-playing Walkman in 1991.

It has also occurred to me during the course of this trial that few among us even remember what Apple Corps was and is, without an explanatory sentence. Certainly, very few of those buying music on iTunes, I would guess. An even smaller number will ever have seen the Apple Corps label - the half a green apple at the centre of every Beatles LP released by Apple Records.

At the time, it was by far the wittiest record label - the green side of the apple on the A-side, the white inside of the apple on the B-side. And the name Apple Corps was also worth a childhood chuckle.

After a while, lots of record companies used more creative labels on LPs, often letting the recording act do something artsy with that bit of circular paper, just as groups back then did with all the acres of album cover space.

Indeed, lying on the floor poring over the liner notes and looking at the pictures and cover art was an activity that, as I went into my preteens, was the logical successor to reading the backs of breakfast cereal boxes at the kitchen table. (Better yet was to take three cereal boxes and form a cardboard semi-circle around my bowl, with the simultaneous joy of providing morning reading material while removing my younger brothers from view.)

Now, with iTunes, we get none of those visual pleasures - no liner notes, no album cover, no physical presence whatsoever of the "content" formerly known as music.

Has anyone else noticed they also never know the names of songs or even the albums they buy online? Without anything physical to look at, I find I have absolutely no awareness of song titles any longer. They are just musical interludes on shuffle. If I am lucky I can identify the artist when a song starts.

Curious that the group that, with Sgt Pepper, pioneered the budding area of album art, liner notes and clever packaging, remains one of the few major acts not to have licensed its music to be sold online.

Maybe that is what the Beatle estate is really fighting over, a lost musical life where the packaging could be as exciting as the music.

Or maybe not. Apple Corps managing director and former Beatle road manager Neil Aspinall testified that the Fab Four's music would soon be available as downloads, following his efforts to digitally remaster all the tracks.

Never missing an opportunity, Apple Computer chief executive Steve Jobs said if so, he'd love to be able to offer the Beatles via iTunes.

Which somewhat predictably, led one journalist to conclude that the two Apples might finally - you guessed it - come together.

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