plus: At the Drive-In [ tickets ] cancels tour. Beck, Costello part of Hal Willner's new tribute album. Juvenile [ tickets ] arrested. Are we enabling Sean "Puffy" Combs by running this Briefly? Or is it "facilitating"? We can never remember.

The Recording Industry Association of America claims that Napster isn't filtering copyrighted songs, saying that "every single song listed [on the list of songs to be filtered] remains easily available on the Napster system." We tested that claim with a couple of songs from Radiohead's album "Kid A."

If you search for "The National Anthem," you get the "No matching files found!" response. Same if you leave out the "The" and just type in "National Anthem."

For the song "Idioteque," it's also the same. But when we typed in "Radiohead"--leaving the title box blank--we saw "Ideoteque" and "Idiotech" and "Idioteque1" (the latter being the band's performance on "Saturday Night Live").

So are these songs "easily available"?

From At the Drive-In's official website:

ATDI TO TAKE BREAK FROM TOURING
Hey all, sorry to be the bearer of more bad news from the ATDI camp, but the band has decided that it has to take a break from the road to recollect their thoughts. From Omar, "After a non-stop six-year cycle of record/tour/record/tour, we are going on an indefinite hiatus. We need time to rest up and re-evaluate...just to be human beings again and to decide when we feel like playing music again." There is no plan as to when touring will resume at this time. We are sorry for those of you who purchased tickets to the upcoming shows, as the upcoming tour of April 11-20 and the KROQ free show will be canceled. [Italics ours.] Tickets purchased can be refunded at point of sale. We will keep you updated as to the bands plans as they develop. Hopefully that will be soon.

Hal Willner--producer of CDs paying tribute to such artists as Kurt Weill and Charles Mingus, among others--is planning a tribute to Harry Smith, RollingStone.com reported. Harry Smith is the man behind the "Anthology of American Folk Music," widely acknowledged to be the finest compilation of folk music ever produced.

Elvis Costello, Beck and Todd Rundgren reportedly are among the artists contributing to the Willner project.

Juvenile was arrested shortly after midnight on Wednesday morning (3/28) for allegedly hitting a man over the head with a bottle of champagne during a fight outside a Miami comedy club, the Associated Press reported. The rapper, who is also accused of grabbing a police officer, was reportedly released from the Miami-Dade County Jail at 10:30 a.m. on a $17,000 bond.

Sean "Puffy" Combs told MTV that beginning in June, he wants to be called P. Diddy.

We think the reasoning behind that is: since most Americans get their news from talk-show hosts' opening monologues, calling himself P. Diddy pretty much guarantees that he will be in the news.