Napster might be shut down
( 2001-04-12 15:21) (7)
Napster might be shut down
Agencies
2001/04/12
A federal judge sharply criticized Napster Tuesday, saying it was "disgraceful" that copyrighted music files remained on its system and suggesting it might be necessary to shut the Internet song-swap service down.
US District Court Judge Marilyn Patel told a hearing in San Francisco that Napster needed to do a better job filtering out copyrighted songs and placed the burden for doing so squarely on the site.
"You created this monster, you figure it out," Patel told Napster representatives.
The hearing was held in part to determine whether Napster was complying with an earlier injunction Patel had issued to remove copyrighted music files from its wildly-popular system.
Napster claims that it has blocked more than 1.7 million files from its service and substantially improved its filtering technology, but critics charge that much copyrighted material remains on the site under slightly altered file names.
"With all the notice you have had, if there are this many `Unchained Melodies' out there, you had better get them off the system," Patel said, referring to the popular song. "Maybe the system needs to be closed down," she added.
Still, Patel said she would not make any final decision until hearing from A.J. Nichols, a court-appointed technical expert.
Nichols will advise the judge on what Napster is technically capable of blocking from its site.
Under Patel's March 5 injunction, Napster was ordered to block copyrighted songs that have been identified by the record companies, which first filed the landmark copyright infringement suit against the wildly popular service in December 1999.
The world's biggest record labels -- including Vivendi Universal's Universal Music, Sony Music, Warner Music, EMI Group Plc and Bertelsmann AG's BMG -- have collectively sent the company lists of some 8 million file names covering roughly 600,000 copyrighted works.
Screening process
Napster uses a screening process that matches file names with artist and title names. Users create new file names as they download songs on the service, which enables them to swap songs for free using the MP3 compression format, which translates music on CDs into a digital file.
The RIAA, however, has demanded that Napster adopt a different filtering method, either by incorporating digital fingerprinting to permanently mark copyrighted works or by simply reversing its filter to block the inward delivery of non-approved files onto the Napster system.
But lawyers representing Napster said the site was doing all it can to block copyrighted music and said the judge's threat to shut it down was born of frustration that some songs were still getting through the filter.
"We think when the technical expert advises the judge she will be pleased and feel confident that everything that could be done is being done," Napster attorney Bob Silver said after the hearing.
But Russell Frackman, a lawyer for the Recording Industry Association of America took a different view, saying current filtering methods were not doing the job and demanding that Napster do more to comply with the injunction.
He also noted that all 212 copyrighted songs listed in the recording industry's original complaint against Napster could still be found on the site.
Frackman said that recording industry representatives were also able to find 90 percent of 9,000 recordings that the industry had flagged to Napster since March 13.
"She saw what we saw," Frackman said of the judge's warning of a possible Napster shutdown.
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