Napster is blaming record companies for delays in filtering the
songs available on its file-swapping service to comply with a
recent court injunction. A San Francisco federal court was told
that the lists of copyrighted songs submitted by record companies
were not complying with the notification process ordered by the
court.
To date, the record companies that are suing Napster for
copyright infringement have sent it lists of around 135,000 song
titles. However, Napster says that the companies are not submitting
the full information required by the courts, particularly the file
names of infringing works being exchanged on Napster’s system.
Napster told the court that it will not block songs where it is
given no file names.
Napster users are now uploading songs with artist and title
names that vary slightly from the correct names, by spelling names
backwards or adding extra letters and numerals. The filtering
software installed by Napster is succeeding in catching only some
misspellings.
However, according to the site Webnoize.com, Napster traffic has
reduced by around 60% since the filters were put in place.
Other problems
News site CNET News.com observes that if we are seeing the
demise of Napster, there could be financial repercussions for other
industry sectors. The site claims to have over 64 million
registered users trading, at least until recently, billions of
files. Its popularity, particularly in the US, has helped drive
sales of broadband internet connections, MP3 players and CD
burners.
There is a growing number of services similar to Napster,
including Aimster, Gnutella, Freenet, iMesh, OpenNap and Hotline,
all of which are offering access to files stored on users’ hard
drives, being forms of peer-to-peer computing. These services, some
of which are operating not-for-profit, are already attracting
Napster users. The nature of decentralised peer-to-peer computing
could, if used on a large scale, have a slowing effect on the speed
of internet traffic for non-users.
Webnoize reports that before the appeals court ruling that
imposed the injunction on Napster, only about 10,000 to 20,000
people a day used Gnutella software, compared with a current
estimate of 250,000 a day.
Aimster, a company whose system combines Napster’s file sharing
abilities with AOL’s Instant Messenger service, had until Tuesday,
attempted to bypass the Napster filter system.
Aimster put in place what it called the Aimster Pig Encoder to
effectively make available all files from Napster users. The Pig
Encoder took file name details and took the first letter of the
file name and put it at the end of the name, a simple way for users
to circumvent Napster’ filters. At Napster’s request, Aimster has
removed its Pig Encoder software. PulseNewMedia, a Canadian firm
with a similar service called NapCameBack is still running a
similar encoder.
The latest challenge to the Napster filter is Catnaproxy, or
Catnap. According to the Catnap web site, anyone can download and
use its free software. It acts as an intermediary between you and
the napster server. Catnap completely scrambles the names of your
shared files. The Napster server only receives a set of nonsensical
words. Any other catnap user can find your files and download them
(without having to understand anything about the scrambling
system).
