Napster Essay, Research Paper

Napster is an integrated browser and communications system provided by Napster, Inc., to enable musicians and music fans to locate bands and music available in the MP3 and WMA music formats. The MP3 and WMA files that you locate using Napster are not stored on Napster’s servers. Napster users decide what content to make available to others using the Napster browser, and what content to download. Napster utilizes file name filtering technology within the limits of the Napster architecture in order to attempt to prevent access to material that copyright owners specifically request not be made available for sharing through Napster.

Napster respects the prerogatives of copyright owners to control commercial uses of their material, and expects our users to do the same. Users are responsible for complying with all federal and state laws applicable to the content Napster makes available, including copyright laws. Unauthorized copying, distribution, modification, public display, or public performance of copyrighted works may be an infringement of the copyright holders’ rights in certain circumstances.

Napster users should be aware that some MP3 and WMA files may have been created or distributed without the authorization of the copyright owner or as authorized by law. As a condition to your account with Napster, you agree that you will not use the Napster service to infringe the copyrights or other intellectual property rights of others in any way. Napster reserves the right to terminate the account of a user and to block use of the Napster service permanently in appropriate circumstances upon any single infringement of the rights of others in conjunction with use of the Napster service; or for those users identified as repeat infringers; or if Napster believes the user’s conduct is harmful to the interests of Napster, its affiliates, or other users; or for any other reason in Napster’s sole discretion, with or without cause. Without limiting the generality of the foregoing, Napster will terminate any user whom it determines is intentionally attempting to evade Napster’s mechanism for excluding (from the Napster file index) file names identified as containing unauthorized materials, including evasion by repeatedly encoding or otherwise obfuscating filenames or posting methods of evasion to Napster forums.

Copyright Owners

Upon proper notice to Napster, Napster is ready and willing to use its file name filtering technology to prevent access through the Napster system to any work that a copyright owner or its duly authorized agent claims to own or control. The U.S. District Court in San Francisco issued an Order on March 5, 2001, that calls for Napster to exclude individual file names from the Napster index, certified to contain the copyright holder’s work, and the correlating Artist & Title pair (or Artist & Composer pair) for the work. Once excluded, a file on a user’s computer under that Artist & Title pair (or Artist & Composer pair) or file name (or reasonable variants thereof) will not appear in the index of files available to the Napster sharing community.

To implement this exclusion, however, we need copyright owners’ assistance. Owners must send to us a notice which complies with the Court’s Order. To send us a complying notice, the following items of information must be supplied for each allegedly infringed work available through the Napster system:

A certification of your ownership of the rights in each work, or that you are the duly authorized agent of a certified copyright owner, and that you have a good faith belief that the disputed use of the copyrighted material is not authorized by the copyright owner, its agent, or the law (e.g. fair use). You should specify whether you own rights in the master (i.e., sound recording), composition (i.e., song embodied within a master), or both. [Note - this certification can be one statement covering all specified masters, and one statement covering all specified compositions; it doesn't have to be repeated for each individual work, as do items #2-4].

In the case of sound recording rights: the name of the featured recording artist performing each song. In the case of musical composition rights: the name of the composer, and, if possible, in order to further assist in identifying files, the name of the recording artist (since most Napster users do not list the composer in file names that they share).

The title of each song. [Album title will not suffice].

One or more filename(s) containing the work as found on the Napster system.

Your street or mailing address, telephone number, and email address so that we may contact you.

To expedite processing of your request, we suggest that you do the following: Send the foregoing electronically via an email message to [email protected]. To the email attach an Excel spreadsheet or a delimited text file with items #2-4. Ideally, the first column will be the Artist, the second column will be the Title, and the third column will be a file name as found in the Napster index corresponding to the Artist & Title. In the case of composition rights, please add an additional column for the composer.

Once you supply us with the foregoing information for each of the songs you want blocked, we will act to disable access to that file name(s) and to other file names that contain the song title and the performer’s (and/or composer’s) name. We encourage you to supply us with any other file names and reasonable variations used to identify artists and titles that you believe embody your works in the Napster index, so that we may be as successful as possible in blocking such variations.

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