Murky File-Naming System Often Dupes Napster Users

Daniel Currow, a 22-year-old college student on summer vacation in New York, has used Napster for months. And, thanks to two federal appeals judges Friday granting Napster Inc. a stay, he plans to grab as many free online tunes as he can until at least September, when he heads back to the University of Colorado.

But he’s going to be a bit more careful about what he downloads onto his machine because “I’ve had trouble getting what I want out of Napster lately.”

A small but growing number of Napster users say they have downloaded songs and later discovered that they had been duped.

The problem revolves around the way people name their MP3 music files. There is no standard way of naming an MP3 file, just like there is no set way to name a word document or spreadsheet. So it is impossible to distinguish, say, an actual Britney Spears song from an advertisement that is hidden in a what appears to be a music file.

That’s what Currow found out when he downloaded a file called “Oops!”--thinking it was the track “Oops! . . . I Did It Again” by Spears--off Napster and into his portable MP3 player. Currow was later surprised to discover that the song was actually a poorly recorded advertisement for a pornographic Web site.

“It cut off at the end, so I couldn’t even hear what the [Web address] was,” Currow said.

Napster officials say the file-naming issue is one of the key reasons there is no practical way for them to separate legitimate uses of its service from infringing uses.

And scores of Napster subscribers who were logged on to the company’s chat room this last week said they also have been tricked.

Some folks fooled Napster users in hopes of getting free publicity. Take Johnny Castleman, who recorded audio ads to help drive traffic to his humor Web site. The files were downloaded thousands of times, say Napster users who were furious to hear their supposed Eminem track was actually a cheerful ad--and subsequently flooded Castleman with angry e-mail.

Others, like Michael Fix, say they were trying to make a social statement. Fix released several hundred MP3 files that were labeled as popular rock tracks by everyone from Metallica to ‘N Sync.

About 30 seconds into the song, a voice interrupts and informs the listener that he or she has been tricked. The song is then replaced by several minutes of a cuckoo clock chirping.

Fix said he had hopes to “force [Napster users] to confront their hypocrisy when they rationalize stealing an artist’s creation and potential livelihood,” according to a statement.

Napster fans talked about such tactics on the company’s chat-room late Friday afternoon, and called the practice an annoying, but cheap, price to pay for stockpiling gigabytes worth of free music.

“Who cares? Napster’s here!” crowed one chatter. “We won!”