SURPRISE! NAPSTER SUED AGAIN
Centerpointe, which specializes in meditation music and materials, claims that warning notices included with its products are omitted in the versions found on the file-swapping service.
The mellow flute music, with sounds of birds and running water in the background, may pose a danger to drivers or heavy machinery operators who could fall asleep while listening, according to documents filed Monday in Portland's U.S. District Court. This especially worries the company because operators of heavy, loud machinery are the most likely to listen to meditation music while on the job.
"Having Napster giving this out for free puts us in a position of people using this who don't know what this will do," said Centerpointe founder Bill Harris, who is still trying to explain to HITS how the sentence made any sense at all. "It's not just like listening to music. It’s more like zzzzzzzzzZZZZzZzzzz."
The company is also suing for the obligatory complaint of copyright abuse, and alleges Napster used two registered trademarks, Holosync and The End, without permission. It also claims Napster used the labels to falsely identify meditation music not made by Centerpointe. Napster, after all, is the entity responsible for labeling all of the songs found on its server, and users have absolutely nothing to do with it.
Harris said he found copies of his recordings on Napster last spring, and that Napster didn't remove the files when he asked. He also added, "It’s not like the company had to deal with any other lawsuits, ordering them to take down their music."
Harris also said he wasn't aware of accidents involving people listening to his company’s meditation music while driving, but hoped that by adding his company to the lawsuit count, one of his songs might find its way into the Napster movie, which promises to be a sleeper-hit.
Napster declined Wednesday (6/27) to comment on the suit, as the company worked on shutting off old versions of its file-swapping software that night to push a version released last Friday (6/22) that includes a filter for blocking copyrighted music.
The new version includes "fingerprint" identification technology from Loudeye, which Napster touts as a way to release many previously filtered-out songs back into its network, while still complying with the list of songs to block, provided by record labels.
The company claims that it is still ironing out the kinks in the filtering system, which explains the drop in shareable files. According to consulting firm Webnoize, the average Napster user was sharing just 1.5 files by Wednesday morning, compared to about 220 files in February.
Napster says that software development is being done on a legal time frame, rather than on a software development schedule, in order to comply with the court order banning the trade of most copyrighted works over its service. And even that has been difficult, because developers have been listening to Harris’ meditation music while working on the software.
