Napster Compliance Under Fire

The recording industry accused Napster Inc. on Tuesday of willfully failing to comply with a federal injunction, insisting in a court filing that the beleaguered song-swapping service was not taking even the most basic steps to block fans from exchanging copyrighted tunes.

According to court documents filed in San Francisco, the major record labels claimed they have provided Napster with the names of more than 675,000 copyrighted works and at least 8 million digital music file names.

A single song might be traded on the Napster service under a wide variety of names, yet the pretrial injunction requires Napster to block all such variants when notified by the labels or music publishers.

“Amazingly, every single one of the copyrighted works is still readily available,” said Matt Oppenheim, senior vice president for business and legal affairs for the Recording Industry Assn. of America.

Hank Barry, Napster’s chief executive, said in a statement: “The RIAA’s call for a fundamental change in Napster’s technology is unsurprising: It is an attempt to change the subject rather than cooperate with Napster as the injunction specifies.”

Earlier this month, Napster told U.S. District Judge Marilyn Hall Patel that 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.

The company says it has spent $150,000 to launch the filter so far and expects to spend an additional $884,000 a year to comply with the injunction, according to court filings.

Both parties will return to Patel’s court April 10 to debate the filtering issue.

Barry has urged Patel to appoint a technical expert to review the company’s efforts.