Napster to Block Unauthorized Music

Mar 01 2001

Napster said on Friday that it will begin voluntarily blocking unauthorized music from its wildly popular song-swapping service this weekend.

At a hearing in federal court, Napster attorney David Boies said Napster was working around the clock to impose a system that will prevent copyrighted songs from appearing on the catalog of music contained on its members' hard drives.

During Friday's hearing, Napster squared off with the Recording Industry Association of America over who should shoulder the burden for barring all copyrighted songs from Napster's system. The new restrictions that Napster said will go into place this weekend presumably will block some but not all of the recording industry's copyrighted songs.

Napster's move on Friday comes in anticipation of an expected court order that could require the company to go even further in blocking access to copyrighted material through its service.

Last July, U.S. District Judge Marilyn Hall Patel ruled that the Big Five record labels - BMG, EMI, Sony Music, Warner Music and Universal Music - were likely to prove at trial that Napster aids in the massive infringement of their copyrighted material. After Judge Patel barred unauthorized songs from being traded over the service, Napster warned that the order would effectively shut it down. Two days later, the appeals court put the order on hold while it reviewed Napster's appeal.

On Feb. 12, the three-judge panel overwhelmingly sided with the recording industry but said the wording of Patel's order was "overbroad." On Friday, Patel summoned attorneys for both sides back to her courtroom to argue how the injunction should be modified in light of the appeals court's ruling.

Napster's creator, Shawn Fanning, dreamed up the song-swapping service while an 18-year-old student at Boston's Northeastern University. In early 1999, he dropped out to write software that would allow him and his friends to trade music over the Internet. A year later and with virtually no marketing, Napster had millions of enthusiastic users. Napster catalogs the songs contained on a user's hard drive so that finding a specific song is easy. It then establishes a connection between two users that lets them swap songs over the Net. The service capitalizes on the popularity of the MP3 format, which provides audio that is nearly on par with compact discs, but at nearly a third of the file size, making it ideal for being sent over the Internet.

In a potentially ground-breaking pact, Bertelsmann in October agreed to lend Napster $60 million to help it transform into a paid service that compensates artists and labels. The German media conglomerate also promised that its BMG music label would drop its suit and license its entire music catalog once the new service is available. Last month, Napster pledged to pay the recording industry $1 billion over five years and to begin charging users between $3 and $10 by July if more labels sign on. So far, the four remaining major labels have bitterly rejected the proposal, saying Napster has not provided enough details about the technology that would prevent songs traded over the network from unauthorized copying.