An Easy Work Around the Napsters Filters

The deadline has passed, and Napster has (according to News.com) filtered more than half of the downloads . Being the curious fellow that I am, I decided to find out if there is a noticable difference yet. You'll have to point me to which filenames are being blocked, because it's just as easy as before.

Metallica, Madonna, Dr. Dre, heck, the whole family is still there for the taking. Of course this is only the first phase of the filtering, and they say that it will get harder and harder to get around the filters as time goes on (especially since Napster just hired Gracenote to help track down alternative names.

I might've already found a way around the filters though. The injunction states that record labels must give Napster the artist name, song name and filename of the song they want removed from Napster's network. When one does searches on Napster you usually put in either the artist or the song name, how often do you look for a file by it's filename? So here's the solution. Say you have Primus's "Tommy the Cat" on your hard drive and would like to share it with the rest of the world. Create a folder named Prymus (notice the purposeful misspelling), then create a folder named Tommy the Cat. Inside that folder is where you store the actual MP3, naming it index.mp3. Since the RIAA can't prove that they own the copyright to every index.mp3 out there, Napster users are free to go about their usual business as usual provided they use this naming/directory structure.

Will Napster users really want to go through creating new directories for each artist/song? Maybe, maybe not. Heck, I'm not sure how the filters are set up, but based on my searches today, it looks like Napster can block files based on artist names, but not variations on that name (since I could find songs under Madona, but not Madonna). It would be a heck of a lot easier to freeload than it would be to contribute to the greater community. Either way, it's a work around the filters that seems to simple to be true.