Napster Remnants On Auction Block

Computers, laptops and a slew of T-shirts with a grinning cartoon cat logo will go up for auction as the now defunct song-swap company Napster cleans out its remaining physical assets.

The smattering of tech goodies represents all that's left of the company dreamed up by a few college students, primarily Shawn Fanning. The company crashed and burned, but gave birth to an online song-swap revolution.

Santa Clara-based software maker Roxio bought the brand name and intellectual property after Napster's bankruptcy. The leftover computer parts, laptops and Napster-logo trinkets are up for grabs at Wednesday's auction.

Available for purchase on the cheap are pallets of monitors and servers that were once used as the company amassed tens of millions of users looking to trade music for free online.

A federal judge ordered Napster offline last year until it could comply with an order to halt the unauthorized trade of copyright music. Napster never met that legal challenge and has remained offline ever since.

Napster filed for bankruptcy earlier this year, and Roxio says it may launch some form of renewed service under the brand name in the near future.

Since Napster fell off the map, other free online music trading services have taken its place, including Kazaa and Gnutella networks. The music industry has tried to counter with its subscription services, pressplay and MusicNet, but they've failed to attract anywhere near the audience the free services have.

Analysts say the subscription services have fewer than 500,000 users combined, whereas Kazaa has about 3.5 million users online at any given time.

By Ron Harris