The most recent measures taken by Napster were based on an
“acoustic fingerprint” technique, which matches samples of sound
from copyrighted pieces of music with the contents of files being
transferred. However, there have been problems with administering
this technology and Napster took the decision to terminate its
services almost a fortnight ago in order to rectify the system.
Napster now claims that its methods of detecting copyrighted
works is over 99% successful, but this was not enough to satisfy
Judge Patel. In a statement responding to the ruling, Hank Barry,
CEO of Napster said:
“The Court’s ruling today that Napster must
block all file transfers threatens all peer-to-peer file sharing
over the internet… while we are disappointed by this ruling, we
will work with the technical expert to enable file transfers as
soon as possible and we are continuing full steam ahead toward the
launch of our new service later this summer.”
The District Court has appointed a technical expert A.J. “Nick”
Nichols to scrutinise Napster’s architecture and to evaluate its
ability to prevent copyright infringements.
Hilary Rosen, the President of the Recording Industry
Association of America (RIAA), which strongly opposes Napster’s
infringing activities, also responded to the ruling:
“While we appreciate that Napster is
attempting to migrate to a legitimate business model, its inability
to prevent copyright infringement from occurring on its system has
only hampered the development of the marketplace in which it now
hopes to compete.”
