James Delahunty
10 Mar 2010 9:02
Record company EMI has found itself the target of legal action from Pink Floyd in a dispute over royalty payments and technicalities of how music is sold to consumers in a digital form. Having being outsold only by the Beatles, Pink Floyd has been signed to EMI for 40 years now.
The artists are disputing how royalty payments and the marketing of their music are calculated in modern industry. It also objects to how EMI can "unbundle" their albums - or in other words sell any individual tracks from any Pink Floyd albums over the Internet without selling the full album.
Pink Floyd's lawyer, Robert Howe, told the High Court in London that EMI is violating a contractual clause that "expressly prohibits" unbundling of tracks for individual sale from Pink Floyd albums, which include The Wall and The Dark Side of the Moon.
EMI disputes that it is violating the clause, saying that it only applies to a "physical product" and does not apply for digital sales made on the Internet. Howe disagrees, saying that EMI's position makes no commercial sense, and is clearly contradicted by the conditions used in the agreement with EMI.