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METALLICA TO NAME NAMES

Rock Band Brings Back The Warm Feelings, Fellowship Of The HUAC
Metallica drummer Lars Ulrich on Wednesday is expected to deliver a truckload of paper to Napster listing hundreds of thousands of people who allegedly use the company's software to share unauthorized MP3s of the band's songs.

The hard-rock group wants Napster to stop the users—all 335,435 of them—from trading Metallica tracks.

On its Web site, the company promises to terminate the accounts of users who trade material without permission but requires copyright holders to notify them of who is doing the unauthorized trading.

"We're giving [Napster] what they asked for," said Gayle Fine, a spokesperson at Q Prime, Metallica's management company. Metallica representatives compiled the more than 60,000-page list of Napster user IDs during the weekend. Real names are not included in the list. Q Prime said Napster users are offering 1.4 million MP3 files of 95 Metallica songs.

The band sued Napster and three universities last month, claiming that they enabled copyright infringement by allowing students to use the company's namesake software to trade near-CD-quality MP3 files.

The band promised to drop the case against the colleges after the schools pledged to restrict Napster use on campus networks.

Ulrich and a lawyer for the band will deliver the list to Napster's San Mateo, CA, offices at noon PDT Wednesday.

"I don't know if it's going to put a chill on the user end," said Howard King, the Los Angeles attorney who represents Metallica and rap artist Dr. Dre, who also is suing Napster. "But it certainly is going to show other artists what they can do to get their work out of Napster. It will, of course, also show all of the band's online fans that Metallica will drop a dime on them in a heartbeat."

Attorneys for Metallica say they hired NetPD, an online consulting firm, to monitor the Napster service this past weekend. The firm came up with more than 335,000 individual users who had made the band's content available online, the lawyers said.

In related news, Metallica's official fan club will now include the following phrase on its membership forms: "Are you now, or have you ever, been a member of the Napster community?"

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