Canada firm uses pig Latin to fool Napster block

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TORONTO, Ontario -- A Canadian company has introduced software intended to help millions of frustrated Napster users to continue downloading free music.

PulseNewMedia, a company affiliated with the University of Toronto, is using pig Latin to disguise Napster file names that are to be blocked this week.

"We're not trying to rip off the musicians," said PulseNewMedia's CEO James Chillcott. "We're just trying to allow users to download files they are entitled to."

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Chillcott acknowledged that the new software gives the company some advertising word-of-mouth and heightens its profile. However, he said the main reason for releasing the software is to "create a better recording industry in general."

Once installed, the software alters the names of MP3 files, moving the first letter to the end of the word. The band Metallica, for instance, would become ettalicam.

Napster, which has about 60 million users worldwide, has already begun filtering song titles in order to block access.

Under a court injunction issued on March 5, Napster is required to bar the transfer of songs specified within three days of notification by the copyright holders.

Chillcott said they have already had more than 100,000 downloads of their program as of Monday morning from a site called NapCameBack.com. He added that they are prepared to handle a high volume of downloads.

He said the software is legal since it only renames the existing files.

Mirrors Aimster function

The software mirrors a program released March 4 by U.S. company Aimster that lets users trade files by piggybacking on instant message networks.

Aimster Chief Executive Officer Johnny Deep said last week that changing file names with encryption makes it illegal to systematically remove the altered files.

Deep said Napster might be able to remove encrypted file names one by one, but it couldn't "reverse engineer" the NapCameBack Encoder to remove all songs that had been encrypted -- even though the encryption is so simple that anyone can deduce the real title of an encrypted file name.

The Digital Millennium Copyright Act outlaws the reverse engineering of encryption schemes, Deep said. Encryption is defined as "the scrambling and descrambling of information using mathematical formulas or algorithms."

Song list sent

The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) has sent a list of 135,000 songs to Napster that the company must block from being swapped over its wildly popular Internet service by Wednesday, a group spokeswoman said Sunday.

Under a court injunction issued March 5, Napster is required to bar the transfer of songs specified within three days of notification by the copyright holders.

A Napster spokesperson confirmed that the company had received "a list."

The world's big record labels -- including Vivendi Universal's Universal Music, Sony Music, Warner Music and EMI Group Plc -- first sued Napster in December 1999, claiming it was a haven for copyright piracy that would cost them billions of dollars in lost music sales. (AOL Time Warner is the parent company of CNN.com.)

Industry experts expect that Napster's service will slow down significantly once the blocks are implemented. Napster has tried to block the transfer of 500 to 1,000 song titles over the past week, but in some cases users managed to get around the screening mechanisms.

The Associated Press & Reuters and CNN.com Technology Editor Daniel Sieberg contributed to this report.

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