Napster Unplugged

Jul 03 2001

Napster pulled the plug on its song-swapping service late Sunday night because of glitches in its music database.

Since Sunday night, Napster users could only listen to files they had previously downloaded on their hard drive; they could no longer use Napster to trade files with other members of the company's online community. The shutdown came four days after Napster required users to upgrade their software and prevented them from trading music on previous versions of Napster.

A Napster representative said Monday that problems with a music database forced the Redwood City, Calif., company to turn off the new service, called version 2.0 beta 10.3. Napster declined to estimate when the service would be operating again.

"File transfers have been temporarily suspended while Napster upgrades the databases that support our new file identification technology," a note on the company's Web service said. "Keep checking this space for updates."

Napster launched the new version of its song-swapping service last week in order to better comply with a court injunction that requires the startup to prevent users from sharing copyrighted music. The major record labels sued Napster in December 1999 for infringing on copyrights and won the injunction in March.

The latest version of Napster launched last week includes new fingerprinting technology designed to identify copyrighted music more accurately than the copy's previous text-based searches. The problems that led to Napster's shutdown were not caused by that fingerprinting technology, provided by Relatable of Alexandria, Va., according to the representative.

The fingerprinting technology, however, does work directly with the music database that experienced problems. The technology is designed to attach a fingerprint - an identifier based on acoustical characteristics - to a song requested for download and check the music database to determine whether that song is authorized for download. Napster is using a music database of digital fingerprints from Seattle-based Loudeye Technologies and a database of music content from Gracenote of Berkeley, Calif. Neither of the companies' technologies is responsible for Napster's current problem, a Napster representative said.

To satisfy the injunction, the database must contain the more than 800,000 copyrighted works that major record labels have told Napster must be blocked from its system.

Napster also intends to use the fingerprinting technology in its new subscription service, scheduled to launch by the end of the summer.