Fans of Napster are noticing that it is getting harder and harder to find their favorite songs on the popular file-swapping service. Not only are today's popular and well known songs becoming a hard to find comodity, but so are lesser known songs. The reason for this: overblocking.

In a statement posted Thursday on the Napster Web site, the company says the problem stems from their filtering efforts. Their most recent efforts to comply with a judge's order to remove copyrighted songs has the service blocking common words in the English language. This includes taking material that no one has asked to have removed, like indie music, concert recordings, etc.

The following is Napster's official statement:

Napster is continuing to comply with the District Court’s injunction and to prevent the record companies from shutting down file sharing. In the process of doing so, we have implemented a range of filters designed to remove from the Napster service all copyrighted works for which we have received notice. We have recently enhanced those filters in an effort to screen out the wide range of variations in artist name and song title that result in noticed works continuing to appear on the Napster index. That, in turn, has unfortunately caused substantial additional "overblocking,” the unintentional removal of otherwise authorized works, for which we apologize to our users and artists. We will continue to refine our filters in an effort to avoid overblocking to the extent possible.

While many of the variations in artist and title names are the natural result of individuals naming their own files, some of the variations are deliberate attempts to evade the filters and share material over the Napster service that would otherwise be blocked. Napster’s terms of service prohibit the use of evasive measures such as pig latin, napcameback, napsterdecoder and otherwise deliberately altering file names in order to evade Napster's filters. Users found to be employing such evasive techniques will receive a warning and those who continue to share such files will be blocked from using the Napster service. This determination is based on an examination of the file names the user is making available to the Napster index.

Thank you for your continuing support. Napster is making significant strides in the development of our new service. Look for future announcements in this space.