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A federal judge appeared to take a dim view of efforts to amplify Napster Inc.’s legal troubles, but didn’t immediately rule Tuesday on requests to allow thousands of music publishers, songwriters and other artists to join the case. 

The National Music Publishers’ Association asked the judge to certify its 26,000 members as a class deserving payments from Napster for copyright songs that have been illegally traded. Lawyers for another group of suing musicians also asked for class-action status. 

“I’m not going to supervise the whole world,” U.S. District Judge Marilyn Hall Patel said. 

Patel also suggested she would dismiss legal action against Napster’s major financial backers, including the company’s acting chief executive, Hank Barry, and the San Francisco venture capital firm Hummer Winblad, which invested $15 million in the music file-swapping service. 

“Investment is not enough to hold them liable,” Patel said. 

Napster was back in court to defend its compliance with Patel’s order that it block the trading of copyright songs pending trial on the Recording Industry Association of America’s lawsuit, which seeks to close Napster down entirely. The RIAA says Napster hasn’t gone far enough to screen out song files to which it doesn’t have rights. 

But Napster says it’s doing all it can with limited resources. 

On Tuesday, Napster bought the assets and engineering team of Palo Alto-based Gigabeat Inc., which specializes in music-searching technologies that should help Napster filter which songs are available on its site. The cost of the deal was not disclosed. 

The Redwood City-based Napster also hired 15 more people to weed out unauthorized music, and has partnered with Gracenote, a company that tracks multiple spellings of popular song titles. Its new policy is to kick off users who continue trading music by modifying the file names of songs. 

In total, Napster says it has excluded from its index about 311,000 unique artist-song title pairs as well as 1.7 million file names corresponding to those artist-title pairs. Usage has dropped considerably since it began blocking songs last month, it said. 

Still, the two sides differ on how to interpret Patel’s order. 

Napster maintains that it must block songs only after being given an artist name, song title, file name and proof of copyright. The recording industry says Napster must search for infringing content even before receiving proper notification from copyright holders. 

A technical mediator has been appointed to help resolve the disputes. A.J. “Nick” Nichols, who served as a neutral court expert in Sun Microsystems’ suit against Microsoft, was appointed about two weeks ago, Napster confirmed Tuesday. 

The effort by songwriters Tuesday was joined by Grammy-winning songwriter Jeffrey Cohen, who has penned hits for Mariah Carey, The Pointer Sisters and Faith Evans. “I depend solely on my songwriting income to earn a living and support my family,” Cohen said. 

While Cohen thinks Napster technology is “fabulously brilliant,” he says hundreds of his songs are being downloaded for free. He wants Napster to implement a subscription fee. 

Napster is itself expected to switch to a subscription-based model soon, with the help of Bertelsmann, one of its investors. 

The end of free-music giveaways on Napster has spurred a slew of dealmaking in the ever-changing online music industry. 

The latest occurred last week, when Internet giant Yahoo! Inc. struck an alliance with Duet, the online music distribution company backed by Sony Corp. and French media conglomerate Vivendi Universal, letting users pay a fee to gain online access to thousands of songs. 

Duet will face competition from MusicNet, a subscription-based music streaming and download service also scheduled to debut this year. That service, also announced last week, is a venture between Seattle-based RealNetworks Inc. and record label owners AOL Time Warner Inc., Bertelsmann AG and EMI Group.