By
The Associated Press
SAN FRANCISCO - A federal judge ordered Napster Inc. yesterday to block any copyright-protected songs from its service, giving the recording industry another victory.
U.S. District Judge Marilyn Hall Patel, issuing an injunction she reworked on the order of an appeals court, said that once record labels present Napster with lists of songs they want banned, Napster has 72 hours to comply.
It was not clear what would happen if Napster was unable to comply with the order, and Napster officials could not immediately be reached for comment.
Hilary Rosen, president of the Record Industry Association of America, said the record labels would comply fully with the court's order.
Patel said the record labels must notify Napster of the title of the song, the name of the artist and the name of the Napster file containing the material.
Napster, which began a screening system this weekend in an effort to weed out such copyrighted music, then would have three business days to implement a system of blocking access to that file.
"We are gratified the district court acted so promptly in issuing its injunction requiring Napster to remove infringing works from its system," Rosen said. "We intend to provide the notifications prescribed by the Court expeditiously, and look forward to the end of Napster's infringing activity."
The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled last month that an original injunction against Napster issued by Patel was too broad because it placed the entire burden on Napster of ensuring that no "copying, downloading, uploading, transmitting or distributing"of works occur.
At a hearing Friday, attorneys for Napster and the music industry argued before Patel about their concerns on sharing the burden of detecting the infringing files and adapting the service to weed them out.
Music industry attorney Russell Frackman told Patel that Napster should start blocking access to songs listed on Billboard's Top 100 singles and Top 200 albums charts, and by policing its system to keep those lists current.
Napster attorney David Boies said the burden should be on the record labels to find infringing MP3 files on Napster and then make notice of those files to the company.
Napster, which claims it has 50 million users, tried to deploy a system over the weekend to screen its system for 1 million song filenames that include various permutations and spelling of titles from Metallica and Dr. Dre, artists who have previously sued Napster and have now joined the recording industry's suit.
Napster's weekend plan was a pre-emptive move against yesterday's injunction. The new screening technology had mixed results, blocking access to some Metallica tunes, but not others.
All parties are due to meet with a mediator Friday.
