By Alice Hill
RealTechNews

If you are not a Beatles fan, let me do a quick re-cap. Back in the day, the legendary rock group The Beatles decided to manage themselves and formed a record company John Lennon named Apple, as in Apple Corps. (Apple core – get it? John loved to pun.) The company had its own label, and in fact continues to be a valid corporate entity.

Then along comes Apple Computer. Whoops – Looks like Steve Jobs forgot about the whole Apple Corp. thing when he was naming his young startup. So the Beatles sue Apple and in return for a lump $26 million USD payment and allowing to keep the Apple name, Apple Computer promised The Beatles that it would stay out of the music business. After all this was a computer company – what did music have to do with computers?

Flash forward to today and Apple is the largest distributor of legal online music, which of course put it back in the crosshairs of the remaining Beatles and Yoko Ono. And tomorrow they have their long awaited showdown in court.

Apple Corps Ltd, owned by Paul McCartney, Ringo Starr, John Lennon’s widow Yoko Ono and the estate of George Harrison, has sued Apple Computer twice before over the companies’ competing fruit logos. The latest settlement in 1991 resulted in a $26 million payment by Apple Computer and an agreement to limit its participation in the music business.

Apple Corp claims that Apple Computer’s prominent position in the music industry, with more than 1 billion songs sold online through the iTunes Music Store, violates that agreement. Source: Reuters via ExtremeTech

We Say: Stay tuned tomorrow, but expect the Beatles tracks to get a nice distribution deal on iTunes, which would have Steve Jobs singing a happy tune – no Beatles material is available for legal downloading at this time. All you need is love.