Statement of Hank Barry In Response to RIAA's March 27 Filing
Redwood City, CA March 27, 2001-- Napster is aggressively complying with the injunction with significant measurable results. In the three weeks since the court's injunction was issued, Napster has blocked access to over 275,000 unique songs and over 1.6 million unique file names. In addition, with the aid of Gracenote's database, Napster has added over 10,000 variations in artists' names and over 40,000 variations in song titles. The total number of files available through the Napster index at any one time has dropped by 57% from 370 million to 160 million and the average number of files being shared by users has dropped by almost two thirds form 198 to 74.
The RIAA's call for a fundamental change in Napster's technology is unsurprising: It is an attempt to change the subject rather than cooperate with Napster as the injunction specifies. What is surprising are the efforts that they have made to delay the naming of a technical expert by the court. Napster will work with any technology that fits within the parameters of the court's order. We believe that an objective, independent expert would be a better arbiter of these technical issues than the RIAA. We look forward to Judge Patel's appointment of such an expert.
Effective blocking is an ongoing and iterative process that we take very seriously. 30% of Napster's staff are working full-time on aspects of compliance, whether it be engineering, database management, notice processing or variant identification, and almost everyone in the company has contributed in some way to our compliance effort. More progress is being made every day. Because of the recording industry's continuing failure to comply with the requirements of the injunction and the massive volume of data they have sent where the artist and song title they provide actually conflicts with the file name, Napster has been forced to spend considerable resources attempting to identify valid notices.
The RIAA's report fails to mention their complete lack of cooperation in supplying variations in artist names and song titles. While we have gone forward to block this multitude of files, it is important to note that not a single record company has provided us with one variant of any song name. This is contrary to both the Ninth Circuit's decision and the District Court's order. As stated in the District Court's order, "All parties shall use reasonable measures in identifying variations of the file name(s), or of the spelling of the titles or artists' names of the works identified by plaintiffs. If it is reasonable to believe that a file available on the Napster system is a variation of a particular work or file identified by plaintiffs, all parties have an obligation to ascertain the actual identity (title and artist name) of the work and to take appropriate action within the context of this Order." The District Court also said that "The Ninth Circuit held that the burden of ensuring that no copying, downloading, uploading, transmitting or distributing of plaintiffs' copyrighted works occurs on the system is shared between the parties."
While we will review the RIAA's report, we have several questions to which we hope answers will be provided: