Napster rapped by rapper

Rapper Dr Dre fired off a lawsuit against Napster this week, confirming lawyer Howard King's weekend claim that more bands would follow Metallica's lead. And King should know: he's not only legal counsel to the corporate rockers but to Dr Dre too. Metallica launched its copyright infringement suit against the MP3 cataloguing software developer two weeks ago, but while the band's suit named a selection of US universities as aiders and abetters of Napster, Dre's suit goes a step further to draw in users too. Tracking down and prosecuting individual users isn't going to prove too easy, which suggests Dre's suit - at least at this level - is using scare tactics to frighten people away from making their own MP3 collections available through Napster. Dre earlier asked Napster to remove all versions of his tracks from its database, but since Napster (the software) simply lists what its users want it to list that would have proved rather difficult. Hence, we presume, Dre's user-targeting suit. ® Related Stories More artists to sue Napster says Metallica lawyer Pro-Napster hackers hit Metallica Metallica sues Napster