Napster Asks Judge to Appoint Compliance Monitor

Napster Inc., the beleaguered online song-swapping service, told a federal judge it is complying with the letter and the spirit of her pretrial injunction, even if its filtering technology isn’t weeding out all unauthorized song files.

Napster Chief Executive Hank Barry urged U.S. District Judge Marilyn Hall Patel to appoint a technical expert to review the company’s efforts, saying, “I’m willing to have an independent third party come in and decide” whether more could be done. Patel’s injunction, issued March 5, requires Napster to stop helping users share copyrighted songs identified by the major record labels or music publishers.

The company has been working on filtering techniques for about three weeks, Barry said, and is blocking more than 115,000 files representing 26,000 songs. The labels submitted a new list with an estimated 135,000 songs Friday, but Barry said only 95,000 were new requests, and only half of those specified a file name as required by the injunction.

Napster’s filtering technique focuses on file names, and many Napster users have been evading the filters by altering those names. The company has been adjusting the filters to block some of those variations, Barry said, but he acknowledged that it was a “slow process.”

Meanwhile, new name-scrambling techniques are popping up on the Internet. But one copyright-enforcement company, Copyright.net, has asked Internet service providers to block access to two Web sites offering name-scrambling software on the grounds that they contribute to copyright infringement. One site, MP3 Translator, stopped providing the software, and Barry said the other, Aimster, promised to do the same.