The Norsk (Norwegian) broadcasting service NRK has created a series of podcast in which the entire Beatle collection is to be found and it is even LEGAL! This is because of a new agreement with Tono - a Norsk (Norgwegian) copyright organisation. Isn't that totally mind-boggling and quite funny when you think of the Apple-Beatles-iTune thing a while ago which still makes it impossible to buy/download the songs legally from iTunes .

How is this possible? Well according to this new copyright deal with Tono the NRK is allowed to put those podcasts on-line for a period of four weeks on end because they consist of less than 70% music. In 2001 the NRK created a special series of programs focused on the musical works of the famous British band that has always steered clear of digital distribution - the songs are played chronologically and each track is accompanied by a spoken introduction which takes up a little over 30% of the audio-time. In January 2009 all 212 Beatle songs will be on-line and with help of RSS-feed and audio(ripping)software the mp3s can easily be saved onto your hard drive. Probably IP-testing will make sure that only Norwegians will be able to access the Beatle material but perhaps it is possible to access the songs from outside of Norway too - I am definitely going to Google this a little more. ;-)

The music is offered DRM-free in a digital form for the first time! The Apple-Records lawyers will no-doubt try to put an end to this. Interesting to keep an eye on this. The NRK has tons of radio shows that comply with the 70% music norm so there might be some more interesting music coming from NRK in the form of podcasts.

- updated -
And indeed the Apple Record lawyers have made their move - the NRK website states that the Beatles podcasts have stupped until further notice "Stopper Vår daglige Beatles podkast. NRK har valgt å trekke tilbake Vår daglige Beatles podkast."

http://www.nrk.no/beatles/
:-(