Napster in peril of shutdown, judge says

Associated Press

SAN FRANCISCO — Calling Napster Inc.'s failure to do a better job of blocking copyright works from its online music-swapping service "disgraceful," a federal judge said yesterday she may consider pulling the Internet service's plug.

"Maybe the system needs to be shut down," U.S. District Judge Marilyn Hall Patel said in a heated courtroom moment.

The judge hearing the copyright infringement case against Napster by the recording industry stopped short of putting her thoughts into action, however, saying a court-appointed expert will review claims by the industry that Napster is failing to remove copyright material from its service used by some 70 million people.

For the first time, the courtroom drama illustrated just how difficult it is to remove copyright works from the Internet site while allowing non-copyright materials to remain.

Recording Industry Association of America lawyer Carey Ramos said that of 5,000 songs the record labels on asked to be removed last month, 84 percent of them are still being downloaded free of charge via Napster.

Patel did not set a new hearing date, but ordered technology expert A.J. Nichols to study the issue and see if there is any existing technology available to help Napster abide by the court order to remove the songs.

In total, Napster says it has excluded from its index about 311,000 unique artist-song title pairs as well as 1.7 million file names corresponding to those artist-title pairs.

Usage has dropped considerably since it began blocking songs last month, Napster said.