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You mean like OpenNap and Napigator?

OpenNAP - http://opennap.sourceforge.net/ -- someone's already beat ya to it ;) And http://www.napigator.com/list.php for a list of Napster servers, including the main napster servers, and other OpenNAP servers.

So, what would happen if all those Metallica fans who own all the CDs for the MP3's they were trading stepped forward and gave counternotification?

This seems to be a common misconception about what Metallica did. They didn't ask for all the people who downloaded their music to be banned, but rather for all the people who were offering their music for download to be banned. In most cases, it's the same thing, since by default Napster shares the directory where it saves your downloads, but the two are very different in principle.

Even if you own the CD, you're not the copyright holder; under current copyright law, you're still infringing by making it available on Napster. The reason to make a counterclaim is that Metallica did not listen to the songs all 300,000-something people were sharing; rather, all the vaunted NetPD hackers did was write a bot (in contradiction with Napster's TOS, by the way) which searched for "Metallica" every couple of minutes, and left it connected to all the Napster servers for a weekend. Thus, anyone sharing an mp3 with the word "Metallica" in it got banned.

Now, I don't have to tell you that a lot of those mp3s weren't copyright infringing. For one thing, they would include plenty of concert bootlegs--which Metallica claims to encourage, by the way; whether they're still the copyright holders is a more difficult question. More obviously non-infringing would be things like "My band covering Master of Puppets by Metallica.mp3", or "Why Metallica sucks donkey balls--an oral essay spoken into my computer's 30-cent microphone.mp3" From what I've heard there may be many users on the list who were banned for providing exactly such content. Furthermore, Metallica compiled this list a couple weeks after they announced their suit; it's therefore quite likely that a bunch of people renamed files so as to look like Metallica files and shared them just for this reason.

For what reason you may ask? Well, in order to file a complaint under the DMCA to have something removed from a hosted server for copyright violations, you have to assert under penalty of perjury that it actually violates your copyright. In other words, if Metallica got you banned without first checking if the songs you shared were actually ones they had the copyright to, they are guilty of perjury. And from all indications, they did exactly that. Whether DMCA allows them to be fined for that, I dunno. (I'm assuming they won't get any jail time, although even assuming 99% of the files on Napster with Metallica in the file name are illegal, that leaves 3171 counts of perjury!) It sure as hell ought to, though.

On a final note, it'd be pretty awesome if everyone on the list filed a counterclaim, forcing Metallica to listen to all 317,000 of those songs. Of course, I happen to know that won't occur, since I decided to switch to Napigator instead. ;-)

I am (Napster username: Neuracnu_Coyote) one of the over 300,000 users who have been banned from Napster's network for supposedly propagating pirated MP3s of Metallica songs. As mentioned in a previous feedback article, Metallica and NetPD claim that the list they have produced is 99% accurate, admitting that they inadvertently included some 3000 innocent users in their list of offenders. I am also one of these 3000 users.

I don't have the bandwidth to handle all the requests I would get from Napster, so I do what most people do - I make my shared directory an empty directory and, when a file gets downloaded, I move it out of there and refresh my file library to make sure there's nothing in there for people to download. I NEVER SERVE FILES.

How, then, can Napster and Metallica claim that I have, and say that they have caught me in the act? Where is this proof? May I see it? Is a federal judge just goint to take NetPD's word for it that I pirated music?

And that reminds me, when exactly did this ban go into effect? I read about it on Slashdot, then immediately started up Napster to see if people were still trading Metallica songs. I was able to log in and found that, yes, they were. I got a good chuckle out of this and shut down the client. Last night, I started the client to find that I had been banned! It also said that I should visit their Counter Notification page (http://infringe.napster.com/metallica.html) in order to protest my ban. I'm having a lawyer friend of mine go over this to make sure that my signing it will not set into motion a whole set of legal shenanigans only to end with me getting spanked with a charge of perjury.

But now, I should get back to the subject of the message. I went into the registry and removed my user information before uninstalling and reinstalling the software. I tried to get it to create a new user, but after going through the signup process, I got the same message that my account, for the new username, had been banned - they must be doing it by IP address as well as usernames.

In the meantime, banned (windows) Napster users can download Napigator, a client that allows you to navigate through official Napster servers as well as OpenNap and other unofficial Napster servers and connect to those without bother from Metallica's musical meddling. Either that, or Gnutella, IRC, ICQ or any of the other genies that have popped out of the bottle.

if this happened, all you have to do is to download napigator and use the opennap and mynapster servers.

i'm boycotting metallica as a matter of fact. i got an yahoo! club in regards to this and it has been recognized by the official Boycott Metallica site

tips to boycott:

refuse to offer or download metallica songs on opennap and mynapster servers

refuse to buy the $65 ticket to the metallica concert

sell all your metallica cd's

turn radio off when they play metallica song

refuse to buy metallica products

The problem is that Napster only has one use, transfering MP3 files. ... A more general system such as gnutella does not have these kind of problems.

But with the Wrapster archiver, an MP3 file need not contain an MPEG audio layer 3 stream to be sent using the Napster software. Wrapster is your typical tar(1)-like archiver, but it makes archives (*.wrapster.mp3) that Napster can shoot over the Internet. To put it another way: <whore>you can use Wrapster and Napster to distribute the latest version of a certain OS kernel so that the official servers don't get slashdotted when 2.4 is released</whore>, especially if you napigate to an opennap server.

Adam

I agree with you though that 335,000 users is a ridiculous claim. They could only have discovered who was sharing Metallica music, not who has downloaded it, and I severely doubt that so many users would be sharing it. Can you say 'cry for attention'?

Check out the napigator server list...

:wq!

The killer combo:

napster. you know where that is.
wrapster. you know what it does.
napigator. In case you don't know what this does, it allows you to logon to a napster server of your choosing.

So, with these three things, you can: find whoever you need to find, exchange whatever file you want to exchange. Feel like a spy yet?