Heavy metal band Metallica has complained to a US court that Napster has failed to block access to its music as ordered under the court's injunction.
Metallica's brief said Napster has refused to take any meaningful technological steps to bar its users from swapping the band's songs, according to Howard King, the lawyer for Metallica.
The band filed the brief, as a recording industry trade group raised the same issues in papers filed with the same court.
Under the injunction issued by US District Court Judge Marilyn Hall Patel on March 5, Napster must block copyrighted songs that have been identified by the record companies, which first filed the landmark copyright infringement suit against the wildly popular service in December 1999.
King said Patel also issued an identical injunction in a separate case against Napster by Metallica and Dr. Dre, who sued Napster independently in March 2000.
Napster uses electronic screens to block access to the songs, but users have come up with ways to get around the screens, such as slight changes to the spelling of song titles or artist names.
The US recording industry accused Napster of willfully ignoring a federal judge's order to block copyrighted material, saying the Internet song-swap service was still facilitating the trade of millions of illegal music files.
In papers filed at the US District Court in San Francisco, which this month instructed Napster to stop trading copyrighted material, the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) said it saw no evidence of compliance.
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."
The world's biggest record labels - including Vivendi Universal's Universal Music, Sony Music, Warner Music, EMI Group and Bertelsmann AG's BMG first sued Napster in December 1999, claiming it was a haven for copyright piracy that would cost them billions of dollars in lost music sales.
Napster uses a screening process that matches file names with artist and title names. Users create new file names as they download songs on the service, which enables them to swap songs for free using the MP3 compression format, which translates music on CDs into a digital file.
But the RIAA and Metallica are calling this method "archaic" and designed to circumvent the judge's order by allowing users to keep trading music by tinkering with the file names - turning Elvis Presley into Elivs Presley, for instance.
Metallica is a "has been" recording group. They
are no longer popular and that is why their
crying so loud, hoping for others to join in.
Retire and live on the money they have, just
like other bands no longer in demand.