Napster, in a 79-page brief filed on Friday (8/18), has asked a federal court of appeals to dismiss the court-ordered shutdown a judge slapped the company with last month.

In its brief, Napster argued that Federal District Court Judge Marilyn Patel erred when she granted the Recording Industry Association of America’s (RIAA) request for a preliminary injunction against the company, and that the injunction itself--stayed by an appeals court hours before it was to go into effect--is unreasonable.

"We believe that the District Court simply did not understand the Napster technology and how it is used by the Napster community," said Napster's CEO Hank Barry in a press release issued by the company last Friday (8/18).

The arguments presented in Napster’s latest brief--that non-commercial trading of copyrighted files is legal, that Napster software has a variety of non-infringing uses, and that Napster cannot be held responsible for the illegal actions of its users--do not differ from those the company has presented all along. What is different, however, is that Patel has already dismissed all of these arguments as flawed, setting a precedent that the company must now convince the appellate court to overturn.

In hopes of doing just that, the company further argued in its latest brief that the injunction is “of unparalleled scope,” and that it is not feasible for the company to redesign its network to block users’ access to copyrighted works.

Patel--in her July 26 decision to grant the injunction--has already said that figuring out how to redesign its network so that copyrighted works are not available for trade is Napster’s own problem, not the court’s nor the plaintiff’s.

Perhaps the one argument put forward in Napster’s latest brief that cannot be disputed is that stopping Napster is not likely to solve the recording industry’s problems with the Internet.

“While the injunction unquestionably has disastrous consequences on Napster,” reads the brief, “it does the plaintiffs very little good. The unrebutted record shows that peer-to-peer sharing of music files will continue irrespective of Napster, through alternatives such as Gnutella, AOL, Napigator and other Internet portals and search engines.”

The RIAA has until Sept. 8 to file its response to Napster’s latest briefing. Napster then has 14 days to file a final response of its own. A date for a hearing before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit will then be set, at which time arguments from both sides will be presented, and a subsequent decision on whether or not to uphold Patel’s decision will be made.