Q:
Is Napster complying with the preliminary injunction?

A:
Yes. Napster filed a compliance report with the District Court on March 20 that includes the following highlights:

• Since our report of March 12, Napster excluded approximately 202,000 unique artist/song title pairs and over 1,186,000 normalized file names, bringing to a total of approximately 228,569 artist/song title pairs and approximately 1,301,104 normalized file names.
• Napster has moved forward to eliminate variants by licensing Gracenote's database of artist name and song title variants. Gracenote's database includes approximately 260,000 "correct" artist names and approximately 140,000 "variations/misspellings" thereof, for a total of approximately 400,000 artist names. In addition, the Gracenote database includes approximately 9 million "accurate" artist/title pairs; and approximately 3 million non-accurate phrases, or variations, of names, for a total of 12 million artist and title pairs. Additionally, Napster has generated and added to its negative database approximately 3,977 variations in the spelling of artists' names and song titles by (human beings) searching its database. Also, in response to Napster's request, Aimster removed their "Pig Encoder software" from the Web, and Napster implemented another form of file blocking to exclude file names created by the "Pig Encoder" software.
• Napster has also added the artist and song titles of certain pre-release recordings not yet appearing on the Napster index to which Plaintiffs have provided notice including Janet Jackson, Stevie Nicks, Tupac, Run DMC and Jon B.
• The exclusions have very substantially constricted the files being listed on the Napster index. Prior to implementing the requirements of the injunction, the average user had 220 songs available for sharing. Currently, the average number is approximately 110 files per user, a reduction of 50%.

A:
Napster continues its compliance with the order. Other upcoming dates set by the Courts include:

• March 27 -- RIAA required by Judge Patel to submit response to Napster's prior compliance reports
• March 28 -- RIAA required by Ninth Circuit to submit response to Napster's petition for an en banc rehearing
• April 3 -- Napster to respond to the RIAA's March 27 submission
• April 3 -- Senate Judiciary Committee Hearing on Digital Music
• April 10 -- Hearing regarding compliance and other issues