Rapper Dr. Dre has demanded that Napster remove or block access to his recorded music. In the same week, a study by Webnoize found that  57% of college students surveyed are at least weekly users of the software? that?s a lot of eartime you?re losing, Dre. Perhaps they should tune in to the sounds of P.E. instead? Dr. Dre has sent Napster a list of more than 900,000 recordings of songs which he says were made from pirated copies of his music through the use of Napster’s MusicShare software. The demand by follows other high-profile lawsuits brought against Napster, Inc. by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), the hard rock group known as Metallica. Each of the parties suing Napster is claiming that Napster is infringing on the copyrights of music recordings by providing the means for people to store and share music over the Internet without the permission of the music artists or paying a license fee for doing so. Both Metallica and Dr. Dre are represented by Los Angeles-based attorney Howard King, who recently delivered to Napster a list of more than 300,000 names of Napster members that King said were illegally violating the copyrights of his client Metallica. On behalf of Metallica, King demanded that the named persons be denied access to Napster’s Web site. The company responded by blocking access to the more than 300,000 people named, but also told the barred individuals that if they felt they had been wrongly identified they could file a claim stating that they were named incorrectly. Then, Napster said, Metallica would have ten days in which to respond to their claim or, under federal law, their access to the Napster Web site would have to be restored. King told Newsbytes on Wednesday that about 30,000 claims, which he called ?perjurious,? had been forwarded to him by Napster so far. Dr. Dre’s attempt to have his music removed, rather than having Napster members barred, seems to be an attempt to avoid having to deal with thousands of claims that may be filed by barred individuals.  However, compliance with Dr. Dre’s request may be impossible, since Napster neither stores nor makes copies of music: the actual reproductions of musical work reside on the hard drives of the individual users of Napster’s software.



Adding insult to injury, a group of progrmmers have now developed a Napster clone, which was originally created to see how Napster works, and have renamed it Metallicster, in protest at legal the assault on Napster by Metallica.