With its future in doubt, Napster launched a major public relations offensive Friday, announcing that it has moved a step closer to converting its phenomenally popular free online music exchange to a paid subscription service.
Napster said it hired a company to develop digital rights management technology, capable of tracking millions of copyrighted songs as they leap from computer hard drive to computer hard drive - an essential first step toward paying music royalties. The technology won't likely be deployed until this summer.
"This solution is further evidence of the seriousness of our effort to reach an agreement with the record companies that will keep Napster running," Napster interim chief executive Hank Barry said in a statement.
The announcement appears timed to influence U.S. District Court Judge Marilyn H. Patel, who is expected to issue a new order that would halt the exchange of copyrighted songs on Napster. Five major record labels sued Napster in December for copyright infringement, seeking to stop what they saw as wholesale theft of music.
On Monday, a federal appeals court in San Francisco sent the case back to Patel, ordering her to stop millions of Napster users from trading copyrighted songs. It's unclear whether that order will hobble or shut down the file-sharing service born in the dorm room of then-college student Shawn Fanning.
Peter Jaszi, a copyright attorney who teaches law at American University, said Napster appears to be trying to influence the courts by showing good-faith efforts to pay the record companies, musicians and songwriters whose songs are exchanged on the free service.
"If what they have in mind turns out to be a reasonable solution . . . or part of a reasonable solution to policing the service . . . there is somewhat more possibility that Judge Patel will say, `Go on and do what you're doing,' rather than set some requirements that would be more difficult for Napster to satisfy," Jaszi said.
The courts aren't the only audience Napster hopes to win over with this announcement. Jaszi said Napster might be attempting to prod along negotiations with record labels for the rights to distribute their content on Napster.
Indeed, Napster said its new rights-management technology, developed by Bertelsmann subsidiary Digital World Services, would give record companies control over how Napster's 63 million use MP3 music files, even to the point of preventing them from burning music onto CDs. Bertelsmann, the German conglomerate, also invested money in Napster to convert it to a pay service.
The technology isn't just for new music released in a protective digital-rights-management wrapper. It's intended to work on the billions of songs already on Napster users' hard drives, said Arni Sigurdsson, chief operating officer. He wouldn't say how that would be accomplished.
"It's like we're trying to put the genie back into the bottle," said Trish Naudon, executive marketing director for Digital World Services.
For now, the revolutionary technology Napster promises doesn't exist and won't be put in place until sometime this summer when the pay service is launched, according to sources close to Napster.
Get content from The Daily Lobo delivered to your inbox
At least one record-industry official seemed unimpressed.
"Isn't it remarkable, as of Sunday they had no ability to do this, whatsoever. They must have worked overtime," said Howard King, a Los Angeles attorney who represented the heavy-metal band Metallica in an earlier suit against Napster.
King said Napster's belated attempts to compensate artists for their works does nothing to set right the uncontrolled distribution that continues to occur, even now.
"This doesn't resolve the prior infringement, by any stretch of the imagination," he said.
