Record industry blasts Napster's filter effort

The recording industry went back on the attack against Napster this week

saying the company's efforts to abide by a court order to prevent the sharing of

copyrighted songs has been "an utter failure." They also accused the

company of deliberately trying to circumvent the federal court order requiring

it to remove the copyrighted works.

Industry lawyers and officials said that even three weeks after the court

order went into effect, Napster's porous filtering technique still permits its

members to download the 675,000 copyrighted songs Napster was told to remove.

"Every single one of the copyrighted works that was originally contained

in our lawsuit is still readily available on Napster," said Recording

Industry Association of America president Hilary Rosen. "Napster's filter

fails to do even that which Napster claims it should do, let alone all of the

things we believe Napster's filter should do."

Napster has filed reports with Federal Judge Marilyn Patel showing it has

blocked access to more than 275,000 titles and reduced by more than half the

number of files available for its members to share. But Napster also said that

efforts to further reduce the copyright violations are the result of the record

industry's failure to identify the copyrighted songs that are being illegally

exchanged.

Under the court order, the industry must tell Napster which files to block.

The problem is that the 60 million Napster members have changed the named of

artists and songs to by-pass Napster's filtering system. "Effective

blocking is an ongoing and iterative process that we take very seriously,"

said Napster CEO Hank Barry in a statement. "Thirty per cent of Napster

staff are working full time on aspects of compliance.''

Rosen said Napster is merely pretending and deliberately chose an archaic

filtering system because its limitations would enable the company to prolong the

practice of illegal downloads. Rosen said the RIAA recently searched for 7,000

songs Napster claims to have removed. It found 70 per cent of those songs

through a simple search for artist and song title. The rest could be located

easily using shortcuts, such as abbreviating the song or using obvious

misspellings such as "Yesterdays" instead of "Yesterday" in

case of the Beatles song.

The RIAA said Napster should use more effective filtering tools and services

that are readily available, including digital fingerprinting, which identifies a

song according to its unique characteristics; or check-sum technology, which

would filter tracks by the number used to identify a particular piece of data --

such as a song file -- rather than relying on the arbitrary file names assigned

by Napster users.

If Napster can't find a way to filter out music, Rosen said Napster should

adopt a "filtering in" system in which it distributes only those works

it has obtained the rights to share, such as those available through Napster's

Featured Music program. "We really don't care how Napster goes about doing

it. The onus is on them to figure out how to do it," said Matt Oppenheim,

the RIAA's senior vice president for business and legal affairs.

Both Napster and the recording industry are scheduled to appear before Judge

Marilyn Hall Patel on April 10.