Napster struggles to meet court deadline

Napster tried but has largely failed to block its members from downloading
some 135,000 copyrighted songs by the court-imposed March 14 deadline. Despite
frantic efforts, Napster was able to block only about 26,000 songs. The failure
could lead to Federal Judge Marilyn Patel to find Napster in contempt of her
court order and issue fines and even some jail company officials.

For its part, Napster has enlisted the services of Gracenote to find
copyright-protected music. Gracenote’s music-recognition service uses a
database with millions of song titles. For example, Gracenote's database has
about 50 different spellings for the pop group 'N Sync. Many Napster members are
using different spelling variations to try to

fool Napster’s blocking techniques.

Legal analysts, however, said that as long as the company shows it is working
diligently to implement the court order, Patel would probably allow Napster more
time to complete the song-blocking effort. As of March 13, songs from popular
artists such as Metalica were still commonly available through the Napster site.

The record Industry is likely to ask Patel to find Napster in contempt of
court and impose fines and more sanctions, analysts said. The industry, having
given little or no indications its wants to make a deal with Napster, appears
intent on eliminating Napster from the Internet completely.

"We are not going to debate the fine points of the order's
implementation,'' said Doug Curry, a spokesman for the Record Industry
Association of America. "We believe the court's intent is clear. Napster is
required to stop infringing. Stall tactics are unacceptable.'' In anticipation
of an RIAA request to seek further sanctions, Napster's attorneys on Tuesday
filed a compliance report with Patel’s court, describing steps that the
company has taken to filter out copyright-protected songs.

The report criticized the recording industry for failing to help Napster
determine the specific file names for the songs on the list. Of the 95,000 pairs
of artist names and song titles that were submitted by Sony, for example, almost
half had no file names, Napster said. Sony's 95,000 songs were part of the
135,000-song list submitted by the RIAA.