Well almost. Napster as most of us have come to know and love it, is about to die. Here is the quote from MTV News:



SAN FRANCISCO — Napster as we know it may come to an end as early as this weekend.

The company plans to voluntarily filter out as many as a million copyrighted song files from its popular file-sharing service using a new screening system that should be in place by Monday, the company's lawyer, David Boies, said Friday (March 2).

"I think Napster will still be the best music system out there. It will not be the same," Boies said after a court hearing.

Napster and the Recording Industry Association of America were in court for a hearing before U.S. District Court Judge Marilyn Patel, who is deciding how to rewrite an injunction that Napster has said could effectively shut its popular service down.

The injunction could come at any time. "The reason for this hearing is to discuss not if, but what an injunction should look like," Patel said during the hearing, according to the Associated Press.

Napster and the RIAA voiced disagreement during the hearing over how record companies should notify the service about songs that they want blocked from trading. The industry wants to identify songs by title and artist name. Napster said labels should instead identify songs by the names of the files under which they are trading.

RIAA lawyer Russ Frackman urged Patel to issue her new injunction soon, the Associated Press reported. "It is an ongoing, long and tedious process," Frackman said. "It is not our view that we should wait for relief for this process to run its course."

Boies said Napster is "inserting a step between the uplink and the viewing of the index that will block out specific file names," according to the AP. "The problem is that this will adversely effect performance of the system."

The five major record companies, along with the RIAA, sued Napster for copyright violation in December 1999. Patel issued a preliminary injunction in July, but the 9th U.S. Circuit Court stayed that order pending an appeal from Napster.

On February 12, a three-judge panel supported most of the reasoning behind Patel's initial injunction, but ordered her to narrow its scope. Soon afterward, Napster offered to pay a $1 billion settlement over five years to labels in exchange for being allowed to continue operating as a subscription-based service. No label has yet accepted the offer.

Napster already has asked the entire 9th Circuit Court to review the three-judge ruling, and will likely ask the court to again stay the injunction. If that fails, Napster's last line of defense would be a petition to the U.S. Supreme Court requesting a stay, although it is unclear whether Napster would choose that path.

For complete coverage of the Napster saga, check out MTV News' "Napster Files."



See ya all on Gnutella, or freenet sometime soon.