Another 230,142 Napster members have become temporary casualties in the battles between the record industry and the music-swapping software company.

Rap artist Dr. Dre submitted a list of hundreds of thousands of usernames to the software company last week, alleging that all of them had illegally made his songs available as free downloads online. Like hard rock band Metallica before him, the artist demanded that Napster block these people from its service. Friday morning, when these rap fans tried to log in to the service, they found themselves banned. "The artist Dr. Dre has requested that your access to Napster be terminated for alleged copyright infringement," read a statement from the company that appeared in place of the service itself. Napster went down this same road with more than 300,000 Metallica fans several weeks ago, risking the anger of many members to comply with federal copyright laws it hopes will protect the company in court. The company is fighting several lawsuits that say it is contributing to massive copyright violations. It is claiming legal protections ordinarily extended to traditional Internet service providers, which are not responsible for material hosted or transmitted over their services. But to keep these protections, the company must respond quickly to the concerns of copyright holders such as Dr. Dre and Metallica.