Napster claims their filtering software is succeeding in blocking songs named by the RIAA.
Napster filed its third compliance report with the U.S. District Court for Northern California this week, saying that the company’s enhanced filtering software is succeeding in blocking songs named by the RIAA. In the documents filed with the court, Napster boasted that it has taken extraordinary steps to meet the demands of the record labels. Napster says that it has added yet another layer of file-filtering, bringing the total number of policing levels to three. Additionally, Napster also hinted that the company would begin to challenge the labels’ claims of ownership of certain individual songs, which are currently covered by broad documents called “general certifications,” that do not name individual titles.
Further, Napster said that it has increased the number of employees working on the compliance project by fifteen people since the previous report on March 20th. As a result of the company’s redoubled efforts, the number of files available per user has dropped from 220 to less than half that. Napster claims to have blocked 87,000 unique artist and song title pairs since March 16, bringing the total number of excluded pairs to 311,504.
It should be noted that Webnoize recently reported that Napster use is again rising despite the addition of policing filters intended to block thousands of songs. The number of Napster downloads jumped to a total of 593 million songs during the last week of March, compared with 473 million files downloaded during the previous week.Ã
