Pat Breslin, chief executive officer of Relatable, said it will be challenging to deploy the technology, which identifies music based on recordings themselves and analyzes acoustical properties to identify songs. We hope they will be a substantial part of our overall filtering solution,'' said Hank Barry, chief executive of Napster. The company has recently come under fire for its inability to entirely block trading of copyrighted songs in compliance with an injunction issued against it on March 5 by U.S. District Judge Marilyn Hall Patel.
Users create new file names as they download songs on the service.
Meanwhile, Napster is still awaiting a decision on a request for a rehearing from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit, which ruled in February the company was infringing on copyrights and directed Patel to issue her injunction. As Napster struggles to comply with the potentially crippling injunction, record labels are hoping to fill the vacuum left by the company with services of their own and recently announced several deals to make more of their music available over the Web. The other two labels, Vivendi and Sony, which jointly formed a similar service called Duet, struck a deal with Yahoo Inc. to offer subscription services.