Napster ally sets new deadline

Napster bosses: Shawn Fanning (left) and Hank Barry

Napster has been given a 15-week deadline to launch a new, legal service by one of its partners, the media group Bertelsmann.

Bertelsmann formed an alliance with the internet song-swapping se last year, but chairman Thomas Middelhoff said that if a new Napster could not be launched by 1 July, the whole service should be shut down.

Napster is currently struggling to block access to copyrighted songs after legal action by other major record labels.

"We're trying to keep Napster alive from the transition to a legitimate business," Mr Middelhoff said.

"And if we don't make it, then Napster should be closed."

Digital foothold

Napster and Bertelsmann struck a deal at the end of last year to stop legal action between the two and so Bertelsmann would have a strong foothold in the digital music market.

Napster was ordered to block its users from accessing hundreds of thousands of copyrighted songs by an American court on 5 March.

It was told to remove all illegal files - but has encountered a number of problems, such as the huge volume of material and variations in song names and spellings.

Failure to move quickly and adhere to deadlines like that set down by Bertelsmann would mean Napster may lose ground to competitiors in the battle to establish a legal, long-lasting digital music service.

It has recently called on the services of a song-recognition company, Gracenote, to speed up the process of filtering out copyrighted songs.

Gracenote has a database of nine million songs, along with variations on their spellings. The alliance will make it easier for Napster to find the files which have been spelled wrong or deliberately misspelled by users.

Name changes

Some users had realised that changing the names of songs would get around the screening process - such as renaming the song Unforgiven as Un4given.

If Napster does not comply with the San Francisco District Court ruling, it will face further legal action from the major record labels, which will almost certainly result in its closure.

"We are leaving no stone unturned in our efforts to comply with the court's injunction," Napster chief executive Hank Barry said.

Gracenote is currently used to store and recognise artist names and song titles when users play or convert CDs on their computer.

A CD's track and artist details are stored by Gracenote and "remembered" the next time those tracks are played.

"The great thing is we have every misspelling and possible variant for every file. For example, we have 50 different ways to spell 'N Sync because our database is based on user submissions," said David Hyman, the company's president.

The record companies started their legal action because users had been able to store, copy and play any music files through their computer thanks to Napster, without having to pay royalties.