Two weeks after Napster began blocking copyrighted songs from being traded on its network, an online tracking firm has shown that its users are downloading 60% fewer files. According to the internet research firm Webnoize, the average number of files shared per Napster users was 172 before a court ruled the firm must block copyright infringing traffic earlier this month. After the judgment and the introduction of efforts to block illegal usage, the average number of files shared per user fell to 71.
"Napster is successfully filtering many songs from its system," said analyst Matt Bailey of Webnoize. "It is not just the number of files available that has fallen sharply. The number of downloads per user has dropped by half."
Although Napster officials disagree with the recording industry about the burdens the company must bear in policing its system for unauthorised content, the company has continued to strengthen its screening technology.
Last week, Napster enlisted the help of Gracenote Inc, a maker of music recognition services, to help boost file-filtering efforts. Grace note, an online music catalogue company, operates a database containing 9m song titles plus 3m misspellings and 140,000 variations on 250,000 artist names that Napster users have adopted to get round the ban. The group 'N Sync, for instance, is listed in more than 50 ways.
In an effort to comply with the court ruling, Napster also requested that Aimster, a company that helps users share music via AOL's Instant Messenger software and is a potential alternative to the service, stop offering a program called Pig Encoder. This changes each word in the file by taking the first letter of each word and placing it at the end of the word.
Aimster CEO Johnny Deep said he had agreed to stop offering the system. "Napster actually asked us to take it down," he said.
However, there is still plenty of music on Napster identified by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) as under copyright. The company says many of the 135,000 submissions of copyright works from the recording industry have no associated file names for the company to block and it is failing to share the workload and provide required information.
Napster, which only a few months ago claimed it could not control which tunes got traded on its site, says it's doing all it can to stop illegal file-swapping. "Where a file name is connected to the work in the notice, Napster will exclude them. Where no file name is connected to the work, Napster will not," the company says.
But the recording industry claims the service is still not doing enough and has accused the firm of stalling. "Stall tactics are unacceptable," warned Amy Weiss of the RIAA. Howard King, an attorney for arch Napster foe Metallica, was blunter: "They're not trying hard enough."
Meanwhile, new lawsuits are landing on Napster almost every day. The online music retailer EMusic.com, which pays license fees to independent artists and sells their music online, filed a copyright infringement suit against the company accusing it of lying when it insisted late last year that it could not remove EMusic's material from the Napster service. Last week, the producer of the Grammys award show filed suit aiming to stop fans from sharing copies of live performances.
But as Napster attempts to comply, and the recording industry senses it is now getting the upper hand, the debate is set to shift to how the enforcers should adapt to the medium of online distribution. If the recording industry fails to come up with a workable alternative, internet music pirates will just find alternatives to Napster.
"The music industry can't beat Napster simply by suing it, because Napster imitators will spring up, and suing all of them is costly," says technology writer Sebastian Mallaby. "The industry therefore has to make its tunes conveniently available at legal online sites, so that fans have less reason to frequent pirate ones."
Napster may have been tamed, but the issue is far from settled. Webnoize analyst Matt Bailey says that there is already anecdotal evidence that Napster users are switching to services such as Aimster, Music City and Gnutella and predicts that Napster users will flee to rival systems as more songs are blocked.
"There are some pretty good alternative systems around," he says. "The sort of loyalty that we are seeing among Napster users is going to be very temporary."
