By Ron Harris
Associated Press
SAN FRANCISCO — Struggling to block access to unauthorized songs, Napster Inc. has signed an agreement with a company that maintains an online database with millions of song titles.
Terms were not disclosed.
Napster announced yesterday it will lean on music catalog specialist Gracenote to help it weed out copyright music. Berkeley-based Gracenote, a privately held company that has been compiling an online database of song and album titles since 1995, catalogs music for online information access and software applications.
Gracenote also catalogs the spelling variants that have proved troublesome for Napster as the song-swap service tries to comply with a federal court injunction to block the trading of unauthorized content. Gracenote's database of song titles, including misspellings, is about 12 million and is based on user submissions.
"We've been exploring a partnership with Gracenote for months and the ability to quickly enlist their support in our file-filtering efforts will greatly improve our effectiveness," Napster CEO Hank Barry said in a statement. "We are leaving no stone unturned in our efforts to comply with the court's injunction."
Napster has struggled to comply with an injunction that requires it to block access to certain songs after receiving proper notice from the copyright holders. The Recording Industry Association of America, on behalf of its members, submitted 135,000 filenames to Napster last Friday to have them blocked from the file-sharing service.
Napster actually has received a total of 6 million filenames, including spelling variations, from the recording industry, a Napster spokeswoman said. That number represented 26,000 artist/song title pairs the company said have been effectively blocked from its service.
Napster is continually getting more submissions from the recording industry and the screening technology is an "ongoing process," said the spokeswoman, Tracy Malakar.
The RIAA appeared unimpressed by Napster's progress thus far.
"We are not going to debate the fine points of the order's implementation. We believe the court's intent is clear. Napster is required to stop infringing. Stall tactics are unacceptable," said RIAA spokeswoman Amy Weiss.
But Napster's efforts have been slowed somewhat by the large number of misspellings and variants on song and artist names. Some Napster users even have resorted to Pig Latin to sneak their favorite tunes onto the service.
Spelling variants of artists' names — "MMetallica" or "etallicaMay," for instance — have lessened the effectiveness of Napster's week-old screening technology, the company said.
That's where Gracenote comes into play.
Gracenote normally provides its services as an added feature to desktop music playing software such as MusicMatch and Winamp, popping up artist and song titles on PCs when users insert an audio CD.
"Our core business is really not helping peer-to-peer networks filter. But it was just a perfect fit," Gracenote president David Hyman said. Napster will have full access to Gracenote's database of music information, he said.
"Personally, I feel like it's a great moment in digital music," Hyman said. "It's part of the solution that keeps the Napster phenomenon alive."
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