Petteri Pyyny
24 Jun 2001 5:17
Napster has lifted some of its file sharing blocks, specially those that are filename based, allowing independent artists to distribute their content more easily.
Napster began implementing court-ordered blocks in this spring, first using blocks that recognized certain words and phrases and excluded those songs from the network. This caused real problems, because many perfectly legal songs from independent artists also disappeared, because they had some of the words or phrases that Napster blocked, in their song names.
Later this spring Napster began using also Relatable's digital audio fingerprints. Now company is obviously so comfortable with audio fingerprints that it feels its allowed to lift the (at least some of the) blocks that are based on filenames.
source: News.com / AP