A numbers game?
Even if the number of songs available through Napster has dropped sharply, the blocking is still evolving on the part of Napster and the record companies.Inside the list of 135,000 songs submitted last week were many duplicates and citations that didn't comply with the terms laid out by US District Judge Marilyn Hall Patel in a court order, Napster Chief Executive Hank Barry said earlier this week.
For example, of approximately 95,000 songs submitted by Sony Music Group, more than 46,000 did not include a file name that had been found on Napster, a court requirement for the blocking process.
As a result, the company had blocked only 59,600 total songs by the end of Wednesday, a Napster spokeswoman said. The company had no immediate comment on the figures provided by Webnoize.
Earlier this week, the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) warned Napster not to play games with the terms of the injunction.
"We are not going to debate the fine points of the order's implementation," a representative said. "We believe the court's intent is clear. Napster is required to stop infringing. Stall tactics are unacceptable."
Napster is required by the court to track down and block "reasonable" variations of song and file names. On Tuesday, the company said it had hired Gracenote, which maintains a database of million of song titles, artists names and variations of these, to help track down misspellings.
The music-swapping company also has employees manually finding variations of blocked songs and entering these into its database. An automated software program that will do this more efficiently is also in the works, Barry said Monday.
Even with the song blocks, it is possible to find versions that have been giving alternative names that slip through the filters.
Searching under "Madonna" and "Material Girl" returned no files, for example. Changing the artist's name to "Madona" returned many songs, however.
A few automated programs for masking song names are still circulating around the Net. One of the most prominent, a program that turned file names into Pig Latin produced by rival file-swapping company Aimster, has been taken down at Napster's request.
But other, more powerful versions of the anti-filter techniques are still available.
