Banned Napster users seek anonymity

Users banned by the MP3 digital music website Napster are being wooed by rival sites which promise anonymity for users.

More than 500,000 users have so far had their Napster accounts terminated because they have downloaded Dr Dre or Metallica tracks. The artists took legal action earlier this year forcing Napster to ban users that they said infringed their copyright.

Many banned users have found it impossible to re-register because Napster has modified their Windows registry files to prevent them using the service.

But disaffected, and in many cases angry, MP3 fans are now being courted by other music sharing schemes. One such community is that based around Gnutella, which does not have a central server and allows full multimedia downloads.

Friedcat, an anonymous developer of music sharing software in the Gnutella community, told vnunet.com: "Users of Napster software are now turning to alternatives such as Gnutella which is a decentralised service over which file exchange can take place, free of charge, free of advertisements, and most importantly, in anonymity."

Friedcat said that there had been an influx of Napster users onto the Gnutella network in the wake of recent legal notices served by the likes of Dr Dre and Metallica. However, sources close to Napster said subscriber numbers were still rising.

In response to formal complaints by Metallica that Napster was a tool for widespread copyright infringement, the company banned 300,000 users identified by the heavy metal band. Rapper Dr Dre filed a similar action under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), which resulted in the ban of more than 230,000 users.

"Napster is an easy target for the record industry, but shutting it down will only force the problem of piracy 'underground', where not only music is exchanged but video content too," said Friedcat, who added that the advent of broadband could put the film industry in the same situation as record labels.

A Napster spokeswoman declined to comment on whether the blacklisting of certain users was affecting the number of people using the site, but she added that the site would continue to comply with regulations in the DMCA.