NARAS JOINS THE PARTY,
SUES NAPSTER

Napster, ordered to remove all copyrighted material available from its service within 72 hours (hitsdailydouble.com, 3/6), was hit with another legal action Tuesday, as producers of the Grammy Awards filed suit against the embattled online music sharer.

Just hours after Ninth Circuit Court Judge Marilyn Hall Patel issued an order commanding Napster to prevent user access to copyrighted material on the service, the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences sued the company for facilitating illegal trading of files lifted from its awards show.

NARAS President/CEO Michael Greene said he is seeking millions of dollars in damages because of online trading activity on Napster.

"The day following the Grammy Awards, we were in the recording studio re-mixing all of this stuff with the intention of putting it out [traditionally], only to find that all of [it] was already up on Napster, and there had been millions of downloads," Greene told Reuters. Greene was reportedly particularly upset with the availability of the controversial Elton John-Eminem duet, which he said, might never be commercially released now. "We are reevaluating [its release], in light of Napster giving it away to hundreds of thousands of people," he said.

Most of this year's Grammy Award performances, ranging from Madonna to U2, were available on Napster within hours of the show's Feb. 21 broadcast, everyone said.

The NARAS suit came on the same day that Judge Patel issued her revised injunction against the popular service. The academy said it owns the rights to works on the show, and previously applied to copyright the material.

"Every single day that goes by costs songwriters, musicians, the singers, the labels, the publishers," Greene said. "I thought we cornered the market on profiting from songs performed on my show."

Greene is, however, cool with the sharing of his nearly seven-minute long on-air dissertation because he thinks there is no limitation to the number of people that can learn from his words of wisdom.