Metallica is taking Napster up on the company's claim that they will eject individual users from using their service if an artist can prove that the specific user violated copyrights using their software. Metallica is expected to deliver information to Napster, Inc. on Wed. April 3rd, which implicates 335,000 individuals who have made Metallica's music available to other users through the Napster trading software. The names came from an online consulting firm called NetPD which was hired by Howard King, Metallica's attorney, to monitor Napster's traffic over the final weekend of April. 

Only users who traded commercially available songs will be included in the list submitted to Napster. Fans who traded bootlegs or demos only will not be turned in. 

Many users of Napster are mistaken in the belief that they were acting anonymously when trading MP3 files with the service. Unfortunately for them, tracking Internet use is quite easy. Here is a simple explanation of how this works.  Each computer on the web typically has a unique id number assigned to it when they log on to their ISP. This number is called an IP address. Whenever a computer on the net connects to another computer this unique number is used. With out this system, you could request say Napster.com and unless their server knows where to send the data back to, you would never be able to connect.  The same applies to using Napster's software, every time you connect to another users hard drive to access MP3's with the software both your IP number and the IP of the computer you are accessing the files on are exchanged.  It works similar to telephone systems. Except tracking Internet traffic is much easier because both the senders and the requesters IP numbers are included with each packet of data transferred across the net.  (please no hate mail from computer geeks if this isn't 100% accurate. It's close enough to give average internet users the idea of how this works.) 

What does this mean for users of Napster? At this point Metallica's attorney says that the 335,000 individuals tracked over this past weekend will not be included in the lawsuit against Napster. However, if Napster does live up to its stated policy, these users will be blocked from using the service in the future. If you look at the big picture however, there is no stopping other artist or record companies from doing the same thing Metallica did and using that information to turn around and sue individual traders.