|
Napster not complying: industry
|
 |
March 28, 2001: 7:43 a.m. ET
Recording industry said Napster not fully blocking copyrighted works
|
NEW YORK (CNNfn) - The recording industry has accused Napster of willfully not following a federal judge's order to block copyrighted material, saying the song-swap service was still fostering the trade of millions of illegal music files online.
In papers filed at the U.S. District Court in San Francisco late Tuesday, the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) said it saw no evidence of compliance.
"There is no effective filtering out of copyrighted works operating now within Napster. We believe it is willful," RIAA President Hilary Rosen told a telephone news conference, according to the Associated Press. "Virtually all of the music that we noticed to Napster, that they claimed they have filtered out, is still available on their system."
Napster CEO Hank Barry issued a statement rejecting the RIAA's accusations. "Napster is aggressively complying with the injunction with significant measurable results. In the three weeks since the court's injunction was issued, Napster has blocked access to over 275,000 unique songs and over 1.6 million unique file names," Barry said.
 The total number of files available through the Napster index at any one time has dropped 57 percent, to 160 million from 370 million, and the average number of files being shared by users has dropped by almost two-thirds, to 74 from 198, Barry said.
The RIAA's legal move Tuesday was in response to an earlier filing by Napster in which the company detailed the steps it has taken to comply with the injunction issued by U.S. District Judge Marilyn Hall Patel.
The RIAA wants Napster to employ a more rigorous technology to weed out the infringing files that are traded without authorization over its system.
The world's biggest record labels -- including Vivendi Universal's Universal Music, Sony Music (SNE: Research, Estimates), Warner Music (TWX: Research, Estimates), 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.
The Redwood City-based company said it is weeding out the works, but that many of the submissions of copyright works from the recording industry have no associated file names for the company to block. In addition, many files on the network are misspelled or incorrectly labeled.
The company said it has tried to block misspellings manually, and has also recently announced an alliance with Gracenote, which has a database with millions of song name variations.
Napster is hoping to survive until July, when it plans to launch a paid subscription service with Bertelsmann AG.
--from staff and wire reports 
|
|
|
|
|
 |
|
