Briefly: Warner Downloads, Napster, Pearl Jam Concert, Madonna.com

Warner Music Group became the last of the five major record companies to offer digital music distribution. Sony, EMI, Universal and BMG are the other four.

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Howard King, attorney for Metallica and Dr. Dre, has sent letters to colleges and universities, requesting that they ban student access to Napster on campus servers, CNet reported.

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Napster has filed its final response to the Recording Industry Association of America, to whom a Federal District Court awarded an temporary injunction to shut Napster down while the RIAA's copyright infringement lawsuit against Napster is tried in court.

Napster told the U.S. Court of Appeals, "The recording industry is attempting in this case to try to maintain control over music distribution. By repeatedly refusing Napster's offers of a reasonable license and opposing a compulsory license, they have demonstrated that they are not seeking to be appropriately compensated, but rather to kill or control a technology they view as competition."

"Offers"? SoundSpike Briefly hopes to hear more about those.

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An off-duty police officer was arrested for urinating on a soundboard at Pearl Jam's Aug. 29 concert in Mansfield, Mass., Pollstar reported.

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According to The Associated Press, Madonna and Madonna Rehabilitation Hospital in Lincoln, Neb. are competing for the Internet domain name madonna.com. Madonna.com had reportedly been a porn site owned by Dan Parisi, who wants to donate the name to the hospital, despite the singer's objection. The World Intellectual Property Organization is expected to rule this month on which party gets the domain name.

(Madonna Rehabilitation, a Roman Catholic hospital, already has the domain name madonna.org--the "dot-org" denoting a charitable organization. Why do they want "dot-com" now? To get more clicks? Attract more advertisers? Move on up to the hospital big leagues?)

On why he wants to donate madonna.com to the hospital, Parisi told Wired, "My mother was on me to give it to the church. She was not happy about the porn site."

Parisi currently has at least one other porn site with a domain name that most people would assume belongs to a certain established American institution--forgive our coyness, but according to its home page, this site "has been featured on ABCNews, CNN, CNet, MSNBC, NBC-Dateline, and Newsweek." That's enough for one porn site.

From staff reports, compiled by James Woster.