WHILE THE RECORDING Industry Association of America (RIAA) may have won the latest copyright battle with peer-to-peer file sharing service Napster, it hasn’t yet won the war. The implementation of the court’s rulings is proving problematic for both parties.
The RIAA claimed in a recent court submission that it had provided Napster with a list of more than 675,000 copyright-protected songs, but none had been blocked.
According to the RIAA’s latest submission to the 9th US Circuit Court of Appeals, every song listed in the original complaint remains available on the Napster system.
“Napster’s so-called ‘filter’ utterly fails to exclude even those files Napster claims it was designed to filter. Moreover, even if Napster did what it said it was doing, innumerable other gaps in its filter doom it to failure,” said the RIAA report.
Napster CEO, Hank Barry issued a statement claiming that the site was “aggressively complying with the injunction”, and had blocked access to 275,000 unique songs and more than 1.6 million unique file names. He added that the record companies had failed to supply a list of possible variations in song titles and artist names.
“While we have blocked a multitude of files, it is important to note that not a single record company has provided us with one variant of any song name,” Berry said.
In documents filed with the court, Napster asserted that the compliance problems demonstrated that prohibition was a poor idea to begin with. It also complained that the song lists submitted by the RIAA were replete with errors that made the task of blocking the tracks more difficult.
In February, the US Court of Appeals ruled that the original injunction, which banned Napster from distributing copyrighted material, should be amended. Judge Patel has since ordered that the music companies should submit, “for each work… the name(s) of one or more files available on the Napster system containing such work.”
Napster claims it has received thousands of artists’ names and their song titles but no examples of associated MP3 file names. Furthermore, it claimed that some of the keywords that had been provided had forced its filtering technology to block thousands of songs that were previously legally available on the network.
In reply, the RIAA argued that Napster had access to, but was not using, more advanced technology that could identify specific sound recordings.
All 212 songs in the original complaint against Napster remained available, and 70% of them were retrieved by the RIAA in a search by title and artist name. The remaining recordings were found by modifying searches with obvious misspellings or numerals.
The industry said Napster should abandon the process of filtering out copyrighted files and instead use a filter-in method, which would not allow such songs in its system.