To date, the record companies that are suing Napster for copyright infringement have sent it lists of around 135,000 song titles. However, Napster says that the companies are not submitting the full information required by the courts, particularly the file names of infringing works being exchanged on Napster’s system. Napster told the court that it will not block songs where it is given no file names.
Napster users are now uploading songs with artist and title names that vary slightly from the correct names, by spelling names backwards or adding extra letters and numerals. The filtering software installed by Napster is succeeding in catching only some misspellings.
However, according to the site Webnoize.com, Napster traffic has reduced by around 60% since the filters were put in place.
News site CNET News.com observes that if we are seeing the demise of Napster, there could be financial repercussions for other industry sectors. The site claims to have over 64 million registered users trading, at least until recently, billions of files. Its popularity, particularly in the US, has helped drive sales of broadband internet connections, MP3 players and CD burners.
There is a growing number of services similar to Napster, including Aimster, Gnutella, Freenet, iMesh, OpenNap and Hotline, all of which are offering access to files stored on users’ hard drives, being forms of peer-to-peer computing. These services, some of which are operating not-for-profit, are already attracting Napster users. The nature of decentralised peer-to-peer computing could, if used on a large scale, have a slowing effect on the speed of internet traffic for non-users.
Webnoize reports that before the appeals court ruling that imposed the injunction on Napster, only about 10,000 to 20,000 people a day used Gnutella software, compared with a current estimate of 250,000 a day.
Aimster, a company whose system combines Napster’s file sharing abilities with AOL’s Instant Messenger service, had until Tuesday, attempted to bypass the Napster filter system.
Aimster put in place what it called the Aimster Pig Encoder to effectively make available all files from Napster users. The Pig Encoder took file name details and took the first letter of the file name and put it at the end of the name, a simple way for users to circumvent Napster’ filters. At Napster’s request, Aimster has removed its Pig Encoder software. PulseNewMedia, a Canadian firm with a similar service called NapCameBack is still running a similar encoder.
The latest challenge to the Napster filter is Catnaproxy, or Catnap. According to the Catnap web site, anyone can download and use its free software. It acts as an intermediary between you and the napster server. Catnap completely scrambles the names of your shared files. The Napster server only receives a set of nonsensical words. Any other catnap user can find your files and download them (without having to understand anything about the scrambling system).