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Saturday Morning News

Napster Will Begin Blocking Access to Copyrighted Materials

Aired March 3, 2001 - 9:05 a.m. ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

MILES O'BRIEN, CNN ANCHOR: The online music-swapping service Napster says it is going to begin blocking access to copyright material this weekend in a move to keep itself in business.

KYRA PHILLIPS, CNN ANCHOR: We've been following the story this morning with our technology correspondent, Rick Lockridge, and he joins us once again to sort it all out for us.

All right, we heard a little Lenny Kravitz you were playing there.

RICK LOCKRIDGE, CNN TECHNOLOGY CORRESPONDENT: That's right, we've been downloading music just for demonstration purposes only, I might...

(CROSSTALK)

O'BRIEN: It was an accident...

PHILLIPS: ... let's -- that was an accident.

LOCKRIDGE: Right. We're not going to keep any of this music, I just want to point that out to the music industry representatives and to Hillary Rosen (ph) from the Recording Industry Association of America, if she's watching. She told me yesterday on the phone she would be.

So as soon as we download these songs, we'll be deleting them.

But the filter that Napster promised yesterday in court has not yet been implemented. This is a live shot you're looking at of our computer. We've got Napster up and running. We've done a search for the Lenny Kravitz song "Again," which is No. 4 on the Billboard Hot 100 this week. And you can see that we not only found a lot of Napster users out there who have it, but we are, in fact, downloading it right now, 69 percent through with that download.

And earlier this morning, we've downloaded a song by Madonna and a song by Jennifer Lopez. And those songs would certainly be among the 5,600 songs that were earmarked by the recording industry in a big stack of papers they handed over to Napster yesterday, saying, These are the songs we want you to stop the transfers of first.

But Napster has said that it will block as many as a million different song files from being transferred from one user to another.

And that means that most of the songs that Napster users have wanted to download will no longer be available, so the Napster that we see after this filter is implemented will be very different from the Napster we have seen and that we're using right now.

PHILLIPS: What's the music industry's response to the Napster proposal?

LOCKRIDGE: Well, they said it was a good start. They said it wasn't going to be enough. They certainly feel like they have the upper hand at this point, and that they will be able to implement the terms under which Napster does business, if Napster continues to do business, and that is the position the music industry likes to be in, where it dictates the terms of business. And its own artists have often complained about that very fact.

O'BRIEN: Rick, what are the possible technical fixes here? I mean, this is something the software industry has dealt with for many years now, licensing issues, copyright issues, sharing programs when people would not, of course, steal a shrink-wrapped program from a store. Is there a silver bullet that lurks just beyond the horizon here that might solve this whole problem and allow people the convenience and yet get this copyright material properly paid for?

LOCKRIDGE: Well, you know, Napster is right now very popular because it's so easy to use. So whatever comes to replace Napster, if it is going to be legal and in conjunction with the music industry, will have to be easy. But the music industry is working on something called SDMI, which is the Secure Digital Music Initiative. It's a work in progress, been going on for a couple years.

And they may never figure out a way to safeguard music and yet let it be shared. They're going to have to lock it up so that we can't freely trade copies among ourselves, but at the same time be able to distribute it freely over the Internet. It's an enormous technical challenge.

O'BRIEN: That is a conundrum. All right, thank you very much, Rick Lockridge, for that unfiltered report on Napster. And keep us posted.

He's still downloading as we speak.

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