Lars Ulrich, the band’s drummer, and attorney Howard King hand-delivered to Napster Inc.’s headquarters 60,000 pages of names of people the band says have been trading its songs online.

“If they want to steal Metallica’s music, instead of hiding behind their computers in their bedrooms and dorm rooms, then just go down to Tower Records and grab them off the shelves,” Ulrich said.

Napster’s software allows computer users to search for songs online and download them directly from one another’s hard drives. Because Napster does not directly provide the copyrighted music, it claims its service is legal.

Metallica is suing Napster in federal court to block its users from accessing the band’s music via the company’s computer servers in San Mateo. Napster said it may comply with the band’s request to remove users who continue to trade such popular Metallica tunes as “The Unforgiven” and “Enter Sandman.”

Company spokesman Dan Wool said Wednesday that the company would release a statement in response to Metallica’s action. Metallica encourages fans to record bootlegs of its concerts, but the band’s members drew a distinction between live recordings and the high-quality digital copies of its studio recordings being traded on the Internet.

“We are going after Napster, the main artery,” Metallica singer and guitarist James Hetfield explained Tuesday in an online chat session. He said the band’s fans are breaking the law, but “we are not going after individual fans. Metallica has always felt fans are family.”

The band says the violations of its copyrighted material were monitored and logged by NetPD, a computer consulting firm that found thousands of Napster users making Metallica songs available last weekend.

Metallica thrust itself into the music-download controversy on April 13, when it became the first band to sue Napster. The federal lawsuit filed in Los Angeles accused Napster of copyright infringement and racketeering and also named three universities that allowed students to access Napster through their servers.

Two of the schools, Yale University and Indiana University, were dropped from the suit after they blocked student access to Napster’s Web servers. The University of Southern California was also dropped after saying it would permit students to access Napster “only for demonstrably legal purposes,” such as chat rooms.

Other schools, such as Northwestern University, have banned Napster for another reason because it is so popular that it clogged their computer networks.

Not all musicians agree with Metallica’s hard stance on online music trading. Chuck D of the rap group Public Enemy said he sees Napster and other file- sharing programs as a way for musicians to reach out to new fans.

“I believe that artists should welcome Napster,” the rapper wrote in an opinion piece in Saturday’s New York Times. “We should think of it as a new kind of radio – a promotional tool that can help artists who don’t have the opportunity to get their music played on mainstream radio or on MTV.”