In a closed meeting at the District Court in San Francisco yesterday, the company told Judge Marilyn Hall Patel that it had achieved 99% effectiveness in identifying and screening copyrighted songs.
However, Judge Patel ordered that the company must stay offline until it had achieved 100% effectiveness.
Judge Patel had originally slapped an injunction on the company in February, ordering the company to block access to copyrighted material. Napster introduced a screening system, but users found they could bypass the system by typing in misspelled song titles.
On June 27, Napster switched its service over to a new file identification architecture, but initial testing showed that a few files were still slipping through the system. Napster voluntarily suspended its services last week to clean up the database so that the system would work with the new software.
Napster's interim CEO Hank Barry said in a statement posted on the company's website, "The court's ruling today that Napster must block all file transfers threatens all peer-to-peer file sharing over the internet and is at direct odds with the Ninth Circuit's ruling.
"While we are disappointed at this ruling, we will work with the technical experts to enable file transfers as soon as possible and we are continuing, full steam ahead, toward the launch of our new service later this summer."