Napster succeeding in shutting itself down

Following a week of frantic file blocking, Napster has been able to reduce

the sharing of copyrighted music files by 60 per cent. Although the company is

already late in complying with a court order to block all copyrighted songs,

legal experts believe Federal Judge Marilyn Patel will allow it to continue what

appears a genuine and succeeding effort to abide by her order.

"Napster is successfully filtering many songs from its system,"

said analyst Matt Bailey at Webnoize Cambridge, Massachusetts, an online market

firm. "It is not just the number of files available that has fallen

sharply. The number of downloads per user has dropped by half." Napster's

users were sharing an average of 172 song files each. With the



new Gracenote filter, the number of songs made available for sharing has so far
fallen to an average of 71 songs per user.



After a slow start, the big drop in file sharing took place the day after
Napster hired Gracenote and its music recognition services, to help boost

file-filtering efforts.

Napster has received a list of some 135,000 copyrighted songs from the top

five record labels. More lists are expected to be delivered to Napster this

week. Although Napster may succeed in blocking the copyrighted material, the

company desperately needs to obtain license rights from record labels to once

again allow copyrighted files to be made available to subscribers who agree to

pay a monthly fee. Napster has offered to pay the top labels $1 billion over

five years. So far the industry has turned a largely deaf ear to the overtures

from Napster. Meanwhile, Napster members are starting to switch to alternative

services such as Music City and Gnutella.