Napster Fine-Tunes Its Filter

Music file-sharing service Napster has found a smarter filter to keep its customers from swapping copyrighted songs.

Technology from Gracenote, a music-database management firm, can tell the difference--and similarity--between "N Sync," "N*Sync," "N-Sync," and more, so people won't be able to thwart the blocks Napster implemented recently. Customers are skirting Napster's filter by entering slight misspellings and identifiable variations of songs or artists. The copyright filter didn't block the slightly incorrect names, but people could still identify the songs they wanted.

A more effective filter will help Napster comply with the recent federal court injunction that requires it to honor copyrights.

Gracenote's database contains 140,000 variations on 250,000 different artist names, and about 3 million variations on 9 million different pairings of artists and song titles, says David Hyman, Gracenote's president. For example, Hyman says Gracenote's database has more than 50 different variations for the name of the band "N Sync."

Answering Court Order

Under U.S. District Court Judge Marilyn Hall Patel's ruling, Napster must block songs from being traded on its service within three days of the copyright holder giving Napster the title, artist, and file name of the song to be blocked, as well as proof of copyright ownership.

After receiving such notices from copyright holders, Napster will use Gracenote's CDDB Music Recognition Service to help identify variations of the filenames of the songs, which may have been changed by Napster users attempting to bypass the filter.

And why would Gracenote want to get tangled up in Napster's corner?

"We're big fans of Napster," Hyman says. "Once we heard they were in trouble and they needed help, we called them up." Hyman adds that he has been friends with Napster founder Shawn Fanning since November.

Gracenote's technology will be implemented into Napster's filtering system within the next couple of days, he says.

"Basically, they send us the title and the artist, and we send them back the variants," Hyman says.

"The deal is basically a no-brainer," says Malcolm Maclachlan, an electronic media analyst with IDC. "Basically, what Napster has to do is prove they're operating in good faith."

The agreement with Gracenote should go a long way to help deal with the file name variants, Maclachlan adds. Gracenote's technology recognizes "a lot of the standard misspellings, which will free up Napster's people to do their own work." In fact, Napster filed documents with the court saying it is in the process of implementing an effective filter.

The announcement could allay some concerns voiced by the Recording Industry Association of America, since variants on file names were one of the sticking points in the court case against Napster.