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Pastimes : CD Burners Emporium -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Ally who wrote (157)	3/1/2001 7:23:44 PM
From: Original Mad Dog	Respond to of 3937

Crosby Stills and Nash...called CSNY when Neil was with them for awhile.....

To: Ally who wrote (157)	3/2/2001 6:48:15 PM
From: Original Mad Dog	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 3937

dailynews.yahoo.com Friday March 2 5:21 PM ET Napster to Block Copyrighted Music Files By Michael Kahn SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Napster (news - web sites) Inc., which won legions of fans around the world by providing all sorts of music for free, will begin blocking access to some one million copyrighted music files this weekend as it seeks to conform with a new legal injunction expected at any time from a federal judge. Lawyers for the popular online song-swap service made their last-ditch bid for corporate survival in a hearing Friday before U.S. District Judge Marilyn Hall Patel, who is drafting the injunction which many fans fear could unplug Napster for good. ``I think Napster will still be the best music service out there, (but) it will not be the same,'' David Boies, lead attorney for the Redwood City, Calif.-based company, said after the hearing. Following more than two hours of argument from lawyers for both Napster and its foes at the Recording Industry Association of America (news - web sites) (RIAA), Patel said she would begin drafting what she hoped would be a fair and workable injunction order. She did not indicate when it might be issued, but legal experts do not expect a lengthy wait. Facing legal endgame, Napster officials arrived at Patel's hearing on Friday with a strategy designed to buy them more time to rebuild Napster on the right side of the law. The court battle over Napster's future -- which has involved everyone from the company's youthful founder to major rock stars and some of the most famous lawyers in the country -- is a defining case for copyrights in cyberspace and could affect the way books, movies and all entertainment will be distributed online for years to come. Napster Offers To Police Itself At Friday's hearing, Napster's lawyers said the company was racing to perfect new software to filter out copyrighted material and hoped soon to reach agreement with the recording industry on how to identify such material. ``We have come considerably closer together on the issue of an injunction,'' said attorney David Boies, who represented the Justice Department (news - web sites) in its antitrust suit against Microsoft. ''Sometime this week we will have completed the software implementation so that these file names will be blocked.'' Boies said that, as a start, Napster would begin blocking access to some one million files of copyrighted music over the weekend -- the first step in what officials hope will be a new model under which Napster will be allowed to police itself. ``This screen will start sometime this weekend,'' Boies said, adding that additional titles would be added to the blocked list as quickly as possible. While lawyers for the recording industry pointed out that there remained serious questions about how the new screening process would work, the RIAA's president had some rare ???e online company. ``We think we made a lot of progress in court today,'' RIAA President Hilary Rosen said. ``It is important for me to give some credit to Napster today.'' Rosen noted that Napster's agreement to begin filtering out unauthorized song files marked the first time the service had agreed to try to abide by copyright rules. Napster's service has attracted about 60 million users who swap songs for free by trading MP3 files, a compression format that turns music on compact discs into small digital files. The major recording companies, represented by the RIAA, first sued Napster in December 1999, claiming it was a haven for copyright piracy that could cost them billions of dollars in lost sales. Patel issued an injunction last July, but a federal appeals court two days later stayed her ruling pending review. Major Blow The embattled service was dealt a blow Feb. 12 when a three-judge panel from the appeals court ruled that Napster could be held liable for copyright infringement and that an injunction, which could essentially shut down Napster, was not only warranted but required. In its ruling -- a victory for the recording industry -- the panel ordered Patel to modify the injunction requiring the record labels to identify which of their copyrights were infringed on Napster. Friday's hearing was called to hammer out the details of how such an order would be implemented. Napster has said it does not yet have the technology to sift through the MP3 files that are exchanged by users on its servers and it will be hard for them to set up a system to do that. But on Friday its lawyers said work was progressing fast, although there remained kinks to be worked out. ``We are inserting a step between the uplink and the viewing of the index that will block out specific file names,'' Boies said ``The problem is that this will adversely affect performance of the system.'' The RIAA's lead attorney, Russ Frackman, said questions over how to identify copyrighted material should not be allowed to delay the injunction from taking effect. ``We don't believe there should be a negotiation at this late stage over format,'' Frackman said. While Napster still clearly hopes to reach a deal with the RIAA, it has also requested that is appeal of the injunction order be reheard before the entire appeals court. It has also announced that, along with ally and major investor German media giant Bertelsmann AG (news - web sites), it is developing a new, subscription version of its service, expected to be rolled out this summer. The company has also offered the recording industry a five-year $1 billion deal to enable it to swap their music on a new secure service, but this has drawn poor reviews from its main opponents, which include Vivendi Universal's Universal Music, Sony Music, Warner Music and EMI Group Plc (news - web sites).