AfterDawn: News

RIAA filed its briefs in Tuesday at the U.S. District Court in San Francisco claiming that Napster's screening process is ineffective. Metallica and Dr.Dre filed similiar briefs to the same court which earlier ruled that Napster has to screen the files copyright owners deliver to it.

"There is no effective filtering out of copyrighted works operating now within Napster. We believe it is willful," RIAA President Hilary Rosen told a telephone news conference.



Napster President and CEO Hank Barry issued a statement rejecting the RIAA's accusation as "an attempt to change the subject rather than cooperate with Napster as the injunction specifies."

Metallica and Dr.Dre have their separate suits and legal processes going on, because these artists are those few high-profile artists who actually own their copyrights totally and don't have any record label holding the licences.

Napster's screening is based on filenames and RIAA claims the method to be "archaic" and says it doesn't fulfill the court order. RIAA demands Napster to use some other type of recognition, such as digital fingerprints or in extreme case, just to allow selected tracks to be spread through the service.

Napster has licenced a database of file and artist names from Gracenote and has intentions to use this in order to filter tracks better, since the Gracenote database (CDDB) has tons of typo'd artist, track and file names in it for each and every artist.

Written by: Petteri Pyyny @ 29 Mar 2001 12:50