Valley of Genius

by Adam Fisher

  Jordan Ritter: We had our MP3 libraries that were totally legal, and we shared them with everybody. We shared with each other, and we were like, “Yes! This is cool!” and we all got excited about it.

  Sean Parker: There was no moment of doubt about the inevitability of what was happening. And also there wasn’t any arrogance; it was like, “Oh, we’re just building a better front-end interface to something that’s already been taking place.”

  Eileen Richardson: Napster sort of took what existed and just made it 1,000 percent better.

  Mark Pincus: It was just like The Matrix—everyone’s computers are just connected directly to each other and it’s one gigantic hard drive. You typed in “Madonna, Like a Virgin,” and it’s like: “4.5 million computers are connected right now, and there’s 12,125 versions of that file available, pick one and download it.”

  Hank Barry: It was miraculous—on the order of inventing a warp drive in your own basement.

  Ali Aydar: So here’s the deal, here’s how Shawn fundamentally came up with the concept. So he’s in his dorm room at Northeastern University in 1998. The web was a few years old. Web pages were a bit arcane relative to today. Everything was HTML based, there’s no Flash, there’s no interactivity.

  Shawn Fanning: At the time most of the music downloading services on the web were pretty much designed in the same way that traditional search engines were.

  Ali Aydar: And if you go to those search engines, you could type in artists’ names and song titles and look for music, and oftentimes you’d get search results that looked like they led you to MP3 files.

  Eileen Richardson: MP3 is just a format—which had to happen before Napster could even happen. We had to have music in that format.

  Hank Barry: MP3 is a compression standard that could take one track on a CD, which is about forty megabytes, and make it into a three- to five-meg file.

  Ali Aydar: If we were all still on modems, this wouldn’t have worked. It would have been too slow.

  Hank Barry: Of course it was in the dorm rooms of America that you had the first beginnings of broadband adoption.

  Shawn Fanning: And at the time I was in a sort of corner room, so two adjoined rooms with a common area, so we had a total of five students in there. One of them was a huge music fan, and he would pretty much skip class on a regular basis to download music. When he would find a site that was up, he would just skip class.

  Ali Aydar: So Shawn observed his roommate looking for music, and Shawn got into the act, too: They’d type in an artist-and-song-title combination, and might get a hundred results, but ninety-nine out of a hundred of them are dead links!

  Shawn Fanning: The reason was because where traditional search engines are usually indexing content on dedicated servers, in this case it was a lot of people’s personal music collections on personal computers. So what would happen is someone would turn their computer off after it was indexed.

  Ali Aydar: So you’d click and get “File not found.” You can’t download anything because there’s nothing there. And Shawn observed his roommate getting really frustrated, and he himself was frustrated. So you’ve got all these college students—college students are really into music and listening to music—and now you’ve got this internet thing in dorms: It’s a perfect mix.

  Jordan Ritter: Ingenuity requires three basic things: adversity, scarcity, and necessity. And when those three things happen, you invent new things.

  Eileen Richardson: What people didn’t understand then was that Napster was not a technology, it was an invention.

  Ali Aydar: So Shawn thought, Why can’t there be a central server that keeps track of whether that guy is on or off? And if such a server existed, and you searched against the content that that person has available, if that person is on, then you will see that piece of content in a search result. If it’s off, then you won’t see it in a search result.

  Sean Parker: I remember having conversations with Shawn saying, “Look, we just need to build a central index. So every time I log on, it tells the index all the files I have and makes them all searchable, and in order for me to download, I have to share—so there is a little bit of quid pro quo. And it has to be so easy to use that my grandmother could do it.”

  Hank Barry: He went down and bought a book called Introduction to Visual BASIC. Napster was the first software program he ever wrote.

  Shawn Fanning: It wasn’t the first piece of software I’d developed; I’d written a lot of software before. It was my first Windows application.

  Hank Barry: And he just sat there, would not give up, he was dogged, and he pulled this thing together: He got it technically together.

  Ali Aydar: Okay, so now, so that’s all fine and dandy, but here’s where the stroke of brilliance was—Shawn found an ingenious technical solution to that case, such that if I was downloading a file from you and the download gets cut off, for whatever reason, the Napster server would find another person who had that exact same file and seamlessly start downloading from that other person. As the downloader, I wouldn’t even know the difference. I wouldn’t even know this was going on! It would just happen automatically, and I would get a complete file every time. So the reason why Napster really worked is because you got complete files, every single time. Really, to have come up with the concept of Napster? Sitting in a dorm room? I mean it’s almost like a fable. It’s almost unbelievable. But then when you really understand what was going on? When you peel the technical onion a couple layers deep? Wow! It really was incredible. It was a eureka moment.

  Jordan Ritter: Fast-forward about two months: The company actually got formed, equity got served out, and executives were hired. All this was happening on the other side of the country and I didn’t know what was going on. So I fly out and land, and for a boy who has never been to the Valley before: Holy shit, this is magical! The Valley at night is this amazing mind-bending, -blowing experience. There’s mountains right there, and there are lights peppered across these mountains, and there’s water on the other side, and Wow! So I get picked up by Fanning, Parker, and Ali and go straight to the Napster office.

  Ali Aydar: It’s just a little four-story building in downtown San Mateo. We were on the top floor.

  Jordan Ritter: I walk into this room and Wow! What a clusterfuck of a feeling that was. I could feel the hair on the back of my neck standing up, like, This doesn’t smell right—this doesn’t feel right. Fanning has already lost control. But God bless him: I’m not expecting a fucking eighteen-year-old to have control of the situation. He’s eighteen! There’s Parker, who looks like he’s high and jittery, probably on cocaine. There is Eileen, who had a really nice smile and a really ebullient energy, and all these other executives I had never heard of or met before. I really don’t trust these people, so I’m really tentative, but Ali I like: He is peeps, he is kin, he is community. And Ali and I spent basically the rest of the entire evening and morning talking about circumstances and people and history and how we might move forward.

  Ali Aydar: We all spent a year in that building. That’s where we spent the time building the bulk of Napster.

  Moby: A friend of mine showed me Napster early in 1999. I felt very high-tech with my Netscape browser and my dial-up modem, and it was interesting, but I didn’t have the prescience to understand what it augured for the future.

  Eileen Richardson: I remember being so excited once we hit one million users. we had a little celebration in the office. We knew that Napster was off to the races.

  Sean Parker: Although in an aesthetic sense it was terrible: This ugly, poorly built Windows application that looked terrible in the same way that MySpace looked terrible.

  Hilary Rosen: The first time I saw Napster was in the summer of ’99. My head of antipiracy came into my office, pulls up Napster, and says, “Pick a song,” and I think I picked something current that week and there it is! We were astounded. It was so beautiful and simple. And we thought, This is incredibly cool—but it’s obviously illegal
.

  Hank Barry: It’s very fashionable for people afterward to say, “Oh yes, it was a really cool thing and we really saw the potential and gosh, we were just so troubled that it was just sort of apparently illegal.” That’s a fraud. That’s a falsehood. That’s spin.

  Hilary Rosen: By the time it came to our attention, it had already been sort of turned into a minibusiness. And so our first communications were with Eileen Richardson.

  Eileen Richardson: I said, “Well, tell us where we’re infringing. Let us know. And then let’s talk again and see what we can do.” And she said, quite snobbily I thought, “Just get Billboard magazine and open it up and there is the Top 200. You’re infringing on all of them,” or something like that. I can’t really do anything with that, I really can’t. That’s sort of where that conversation went. She said, basically, “Shut this shit down!” And I was like, “Shut what down?” We didn’t own anything; we don’t serve it up!

  Shawn Fanning: I really didn’t think that there would be so much controversy around the legality because we were just linking to the content and there were so many other search engines at the time that were providing links to that content.

  Ali Aydar: Napster was perceived by the investors, the founders, myself, to be legal because Napster’s central server did not hold any copyrighted content. There was no content on our servers. Moreover, no content ever traveled through our servers. The content traveled from one peer—a “peer” is a computer, sitting out there somewhere—to another peer.

  Hank Barry: Napster was the first application based on that interchange of data out on the edge of the network.

  Sean Parker: Prior to the release of Napster, prior to that pivotal moment, the web was one-way. It was a client-server model, you accessed information that was stored on a server. It was very much this broadcast model where individuals passively consumed what had been published. It wasn’t a two-way street. But the moment Napster launched, you were fully utilizing the capabilities of the internet. Everybody was sharing content. Everybody was downloading content. Everything is interactive. That was the original potential of the internet. Napster was ahead of its time.

  Hank Barry: Nowadays, it’s the norm, it’s Facebook, it’s what an internet application is, but it really did not exist before Shawn did it. Everything up until that point had been like media, like, Oh, we’re going to play a program and you’re going to watch it.

  Ali Aydar: So the only thing Napster’s central server had was information about the names of files people had, that’s it. I couldn’t even tell you what was actually on those files. They were just file names: fundamentally the same thing Google has—with the exception that Google also indexes words on a page. At the time the thinking was that this is just a search engine like every other search engine. So to us, that’s all we were creating at Napster. The copies were being made by individuals, and individuals were choosing to copy; to us, the choice was being made by the users to make the copy.

  Eileen Richardson: We had a lawyer weigh in and a memo that said, “You could use this stuff for personal use. You can share it like you could share it at a VCR or on a cassette tape. You make a mix tape for your friend.” That was the legal analysis.

  Hilary Rosen: Once they got some copyright legal advice, they realized that the contributory infringement claim was the one that they were liable for, not direct infringement, since they weren’t the ones uploading the music. They had created a software program that contributed to infringement.

  Hank Barry: One of the big cases in the contributory infringement area is a case called “Betamax,” which was a case that the motion picture studios brought against Sony back in the seventies and early eighties, around the video recorder. The thought was that if people could make recordings of television programs in their home, then “Oh my gosh, that’s it, we’re done!” And so the studios sued Sony, and it took seven years actually, but it went up to the Supreme Court. The decision there was, “Yes, this particular technology can be used to infringe copyright, there’s no question about it. It also has a lot of beneficial uses, and when we’re facing these dual-use technologies, we’re going to err on the side of protecting the new technology.” In the Betamax case they found that Sony was not liable for contributory infringement by manufacturing VCRs that had Record buttons on them. That was really the fundamental theory of why Napster was not liable for contributory infringement.

  Jordan Ritter: It’s a great pitch, isn’t it? It’s not wrong. It’s not incorrect, but it is not the whole truth. If you give to one hand, you are taking from another.

  Ali Aydar: So at that point I actually asked the moral question. Which was: Wait a second, are we not stealing? I mean I’m downloading this for free, like, something that I would normally have to buy?

  Jordan Ritter: You know, we didn’t show up with some business model to disrupt the music industry, we did some cool shit that took off and here we are, right? We’re just a bunch of punk-ass kids!

  Ali Aydar: And the argument that they convinced me with was, “Look, if we don’t do this, somebody else is going to do it, and you know us, we’re not trying to steal anything, we’re trying to build something, and we believe that this is an opportunity to do it the right way, and we believe that the record labels ultimately will want to sanction this system, because ultimately, if we don’t do it, somebody else is going to do it or others are going to do it, and it’s going to be harder for them to control it. This system is something that the record labels can participate in and ultimately have control over. Why wouldn’t the labels love this?” It was that naïve.

  Sean Parker: Shawn Fanning fundamentally believed that the company would be successful, and that we would ink deals with the record labels that would advance the music industry and prevent its certain destruction.

  Moby: But the labels were doing all that they could to pretend that the future wasn’t really happening.

  Hilary Rosen: The day before the Grammys, the heads of all the record companies would come to the board meeting, and I literally had a screen put up and a PC brought into the room and we played Name That Tune with all of the heads of the record companies trying to stump Napster. And virtually every title that someone came up with was immediately available. Napster was that jukebox in the sky that we had been talking about for years. Shawn Fanning achieved what the record companies had been unable to achieve in partnership with the technology companies that they had been working with for the two years prior, which was a fast, easy way to distribute music online.

  Sean Parker: At the time, record labels were mapping out the most complex digital rights management systems you could ever imagine, and were in a never-ending conversation with their technology people about how to create a perfect system where no piracy could ever take place. Meanwhile the barbarians are at the gate: Rome is burning, and it’s over.

  Hilary Rosen: Everyone at the Grammys that night started really freaking out. For some of them it was the first time they really saw the disruption in the distribution system that they were facing.

  Shawn Fanning: We made every effort to try and work things out, but it became clear that their goal was kill Napster.

  Hank Barry: What those people did from day one was engage in a systematic effort to stomp this thing out, a systematic effort.

  Ali Aydar: The labels actually filed the lawsuit pretty early: December of ’99.

  Hank Barry: There’s no good faith around the edges here, there’s no “Gee, aren’t those kids cute, boy, this is Silicon Valley innovation and yes, we saw how great it was and we really love it but we, you know, gosh, we just have our obligations to do these things to serve the artists, and it wasn’t really us doing them…”

  Hilary Rosen: The Recording Industry Association of America had been a sort of behind-the-scenes trade association for the music industry, then all of a sudden we became public enemy number one. People took their free music very, very seriously.

  Ali Aydar: Napster was never about “m
usic is free,” it was never about “screw the man,” never, not even close! The grand master plan was to bring the industry in. But after the labels filed a lawsuit, they wanted to paint us in this light, when we weren’t that way at all.

  Hank Barry: The RIAA went to the editorial boards of all the major newspapers saying, “Look, Napster is your enemy. Napster is not a good story for you, Mr. Newspaper, don’t look favorably upon Napster, because the next thing that’s going to happen is we’re going to have Napster for newspapers, so you need to come out against these guys.” They had a whole tour, they went around the country to talk to other people who were beneficiaries of copyright laws and anticopying laws, with a view toward coming after us, and indeed, with a view toward coming after me personally, going to prosecutors and saying, “You really ought to arrest Hank Barry.”

  Moby: In 2000 or 2001 the RIAA was basically calling people who downloaded music genocidal murderers.

  Eileen Richardson: One day, I had a friend who I trusted and knew and thought was smart, call me and say, “I just need to tell you, the CIA’s on its way over to take all your laptops.” I’m like, “What the hell! The CIA?” But I believed it. And the same morning Howard Stern called, “I want you guys on the radio show.” So, in the same day, it’s Howard Stern and “The CIA’s coming to get your stuff”—it was insanity. A media firestorm.

  Hilary Rosen: I had regular death threats. I had the FBI guarding my house, I mean it was crazy. It wasn’t just a court case; it was a cultural revolution.

  Sean Parker: There is some truth to the idea that Napster was much less of a company and more of a revolution. Despite all the potential liability, nobody really had anything to lose. Half the company were a bunch of radicals who were not there for the job. They understood that it was a social revolution, a cultural revolution.

  Jordan Ritter: We were literally the very first one to go meteoric, to go interstellar.