Copyrighted Songs to Disappear from Napster Service
DONNA KELLEY, CNN ANCHOR: This weekend could be the swan song for free music downloads off of the Napster Web site. An attorney for the San Francisco-based company says more than one-million copyrighted songs will be taken off the playlists. That's music to the ears of the recording industry, which has been fighting for months with Napster over alleged copyright infringements. CNN technology correspondent Rick Lockridge has been monitoring the Napster Web site for us all morning. Is it busy?</s>RICK LOCKRIDGE, CNN TECHNOLOGY CORRESPONDENT: Still pretty busy and still up and running. The filter that you were just mentioning hasn't been implemented. By the way, the music industry really loves that phrase, free music. As can you imagine, they don't think it's free at all. They think the music is worth something and it's being stolen, not being swapped as many Napster users would contend. But we have been downloading songs throughout out morning thus showing that the filter that was promised by Napster attorney David Boies, he said it would go into effect this weekend and would effectively prevent Napster's 46 million registered users from downloading the most popular 5,600 songs, at least, on their list, comprising more than a million actual songs files, which is you were talking about earlier. That filter is not yet in effect. We can take a look at the screen here. I'm actually downloading, where my cursor is up on the left here, that's hard to read, but it's Joe featuring Mystikal singing or rapping "Stutter." That is the number one hit on the Billboard Hot 100 charts this week, and this other download down where my cursor is here, on the left side, is "It's a Beautiful Day," which you might remember, Donna, won the Grammy for best song, didn't it, just a few days ago. So, these have to be among the most popular downloads that Napster users would be downloading now and we're doing it right here. So, there's no indication when exactly this filter is going to go into effect, but clearly it has not yet been put into effect.</s>KELLEY: Right, and they were saying sometime this weekend. And as you were mentioning, the recording industry, of course, says that they're stealing music when it's copyrighted like that and I was wondering when they're talking about copyright songs, aren't all the songs copyrighted?</s>LOCKRIDGE: Well, usually a song has a copyright holder and that's not always the artist. You might think that the artist who does the song has the copyright. In fact, the music recording label usually has copyright. So, even if the artist wants to give you that song, it's not up to him or her or the band. So, there a lot of songs that are made by garage bands or maybe the copyright holders say let's it put on Napster because that way we can get more people to hear it, those songs will still be available, but they'll only comprise a very small portion of the songs that Napster users want. Mostly Napster users want the big hits, the popular songs, the ones they've heard on the radio and those songs are ones that are going away. So, Napster is going to be very different, and then it still has to face the judge's injunction. If the judge decides this isn't good enough for me, you got to shut it down all the way, that could still happen.</s>KELLEY: And we're going to talk to you next hour as well, too, so we'll cover some more points then. OK, Rick Lockridge, thanks.