PORTLAND (AP) – A court battle is looming over unreleased recordings by legendary artists like The Beatles, Led Zeppelin and Jimi Hendrix that have been hidden for decades in the British Broadcasting Corp.’s archives.

Portland-based Bee Load Limited claims that the BBC’s marketing arm, BBC Worldwide, reneged on a seven-year-old music licensing and distribution agreement. Bee Load’s suit in Cumberland County Superior Court seeks multimillion-dollar damages.

Bee Load is partly owned by the rock drummer Mick Fleetwood, an original member of Fleetwood Mac, and his accountant, Joseph McNulty of Cape Elizabeth. The company was established to produce and sell hundreds of hours of recordings of live performances that would be made available through a contract with BBC Worldwide. Bee Load bought the contract out of receivership in 2000.

Bee Load claims that BBC was to supply the recordings and Bee Load would make the compact discs. Fleetwood would approach artists and their record companies to resolve potential copyright conflicts.

But Bee Load says it has never put out a record, and BBC has sold the recordings to other companies without sharing the proceeds.

The lawsuit charges the BBC with “fraud, breach of contract and other, associated misdeeds.”

Lawyers for the BBC, which must respond to the lawsuit by Sept. 30, declined comment on the allegations.

Bee Load’s lawyer, Paul McDonald, said the BBC limits the amount of recorded music it plays on the air in order to stay independent of the influence of record companies. As a result, almost every important recording artist of the last 75 years has appeared in a BBC studio to perform.

Many of those performances have been saved in the company’s archives. Some – including performances by The Everly Brothers, Jethro Tull, The Who and The Kinks – have been released on CDs in recent years.

According to the lawsuit, BBC sold its rights to the music in 1997 to a company called Masterrights for as much as $4 million in advance royalties for recordings released in North America. Soon after, McDonald said, BBC came down with a case of seller’s remorse.

“I believe that they think they could have gotten a better deal,” he said.

In 2000, Masterrights’ parent company went into receivership and Bee Load bought the contract. McDonald said the company negotiated a new agreement with BBC, expanding it to worldwide rights, and agreed to split the proceeds evenly between the two companies. The lawsuit alleges that BBC did not honor the agreement.

McDonald estimates that the archive is worth more than $100 million, and that Bee Load’s losses are in “the tens of millions.”

Among the recordings at issue are 14 hours of unreleased tapes of The Beatles, which Bee Load alleges were promised to Fleetwood and McNulty when they renegotiated the contract. After the agreement was signed, Bee Load was told that the recordings had been licensed to someone else.

“(BBC’s) conduct was willful, wanton and outrageous and performed with callous disregard for the rights of Bee Load,” the lawsuit alleges.

McDonald said the case will likely come to trial in about a year.

AP-ES-09-11-03 0217EDT