Judge issues new threat to shut down Napster
The judge in charge of Napster's fate said she may shut down the firm because of its failure to block songs on its site.
US District Judge Marilyn Hall Patel said a court-appointed expert will review record company claims that Napster is failing to remove copyright material from its service.
A Recording Industry Association of America lawyer said that of 5,000 songs the record labels asked to be removed, 84% of them are still being downloaded free of charge via Napster.
Napster attorney Robert Silver told the judge removing the copyright material is easier said than done.
Mr Silver said: "All you need is one file to get through the song-swapping system's filters and the protected songs will reappear on the site's search index."
Ms Patel did not set a new hearing date, but ordered technology expert AJ Nichols to study the issue and see if there is any existing technology available to help Napster abide by the court order to remove the songs.
In February, a federal appeals court said the judge's order for Napster to remove copyright works shifted too much of a burden on the internet site. The appeals panel said the recording industry must first notify Napster of which works should be removed.
The reason the site has not been shut down is because this could violate the rights of artists on the site who have given Napster permission to use them.
Napster has hired 15 more people to weed out unauthorised music, and has teamed up with Gracenote, a company that tracks multiple spellings of popular song titles.
Its new policy is to kick off users who continue trading music by modifying the file names of songs.
In total, Napster says it has excluded about 311,000 unique artist-song title pairs as well as 1.7m file names corresponding to those artist-title pairs from its index. Usage has dropped considerably since it began blocking songs last month, Napster said.