by Adam Fisher
Sean Parker: Most artists were kind of cool about it. Some were so angry with their record labels that they didn’t complain. Some, like Billy Corgan and Courtney Love, were adamantly pro-Napster.
Moby: I saw the major labels as being big, hulking, stifling behemoths. They practiced institutional theft. When you made a record for a major label, they would give you a couple hundred thousand dollars to make the record. And once the label recoups the money, the label then owned your record—your master recordings. Imagine you take out a loan from a bank to build a house, you pay back that loan—and the bank owns your house! The labels never treated musicians terribly well unless they were making hundreds of millions of dollars for the label. And so I saw Napster as being this cool, progressive, almost vaguely punk-rock new paradigm. I was very much on the side of Napster.
Sean Parker: And then other artists just had a visceral negative reaction to it in part because they didn’t understand it. They thought we had some giant server farm sitting in Palo Alto or San Mateo, California, that was just giving their music to the world, which also wasn’t the case.
Eileen Richardson: Also we had the fans on our side, so we could say, “Would you like to talk now?” That was the only way the labels were going to listen.
Moby: The labels had treated musicians and consumers so badly, for so long, who really was going to shed a tear if they suffered?
Eileen Richardson: They were scared. Deathly scared.
Sean Parker: It went from ten thousand people to millions of people in a year.
Eileen Richardson: We hit twenty million users. It was a crazy time.
Sean Parker: You’re sort of living your normal life, and everything is kind of proceeding in a relatively normal way, and then all of a sudden out of nowhere, you’re picked up by the tornado and spun around and then you’re not in Kansas anymore. You’re in this totally strange, altered reality. You go through this door and you turn around and look back, and the door is not there anymore. There’s no turning back.
Hilary Rosen: It was crazy for Shawn Fanning too, I mean he was the cover of Time magazine, and you know there were 60 Minutes profiles and there were ten cameras every time we went to court, there were congressional hearings—I think four or five of them!
Jordan Ritter: There was a decision made in the company very early on about what was marketable to the outside world. Because here’s me, Jordan, here’s Fanning, and here’s Parker. Right, does the world like this notion of two nineteen-year-olds blazing a path through Silicon Valley, with a somewhat wiser, older twenty-one-year-old? Or is it just simpler to just talk about the two kids and frame it that way? Eileen and her team made a choice, that what we really want is one or two faces, and it can’t just be Fanning, because Fanning isn’t a good public speaker, therefore it’s two, and it’s Parker, and that’s how he got the microphone. He’s a good speaker. But Parker himself? He never wrote a line of fucking code! And in fact the engineers were discouraged from venturing outside—physically discouraged—so we were aware of things going on, but didn’t really see it until it arrived at our fucking doorstep in the form of Lars Ulrich.
Lars Ulrich: We’re suing Napster for one reason and one reason only, because they exist to pirate music. Nothing more, nothing less.
Eileen Richardson: Metallica was a band that became famous through the sharing of mix tapes, so when they said that they were going to sue us, I thought it was a joke initially, but it was not a joke.
Lars Ulrich: The ideal situation is clear and simple: to put Napster out of business.
Ali Aydar: There was a new album that they were working on, and one of the songs on that album somehow got on Napster. And that was when Lars, their drummer, who is sort of their spokesman, got upset.
Howard King: The song was not finished, and artistically that was disappointing to say the least, and then the thought was, Wait a second, we sell our music—how can people get it for free?
Ali Aydar: And that caused them to go and load Napster and search for other songs, other songs that they hadn’t completed yet, and songs that they had released, and they found everything on Napster. And this made them very upset, and so they wanted that content taken down.
Lars Ulrich: It’s not just about money at the end of the day. It’s about trying to put your foot down before this whole internet thing runs amok.
Howard King: Napster had a policy that they thought, in their youthful ignorance, complied with the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. It was the “as long as you give us notice of who is infringing your copyright, we agree to take it down” policy. So we’re bulletproof, you can’t do anything to us.
Lars Ulrich: They dared us to come and prove to them that people were trading Metallica around.
Ali Aydar: One of the things that the copyright act allows for, is that if a copyright owner sees their content being distributed without their permission, they’re able to give notice and the search engine or platform or ISP then must take it down. And that was the legal umbrella we were operating under.
Howard King: We had a service monitor Napster over the weekend to see how many Metallica songs were being illegally distributed, and we came up with I think it was 322,000 incidents of people illegally posting Metallica songs. And rather than send over the names we let the press know that Lars Ulrich, the drummer of Metallica, would be delivering these names to Napster’s headquarters!
Lars Ulrich: They refused to take Metallica off their list, so they asked for it.
Howard King: We were going to bring them in an armored car because it was almost being sarcastic: So somebody doesn’t rob us of the 322,000 names. But we learned that you can’t rent an armored car. It’s a security thing, apparently. So we take the Suburban.
Sean Parker: The San Mateo County police department had their motorcycle squad there, there were helicopters swirling and news crews. It was covered on MTV and a lot of other media outlets live.
Jordan Ritter: We’re like this little dinky company at the top floor of this shit building, and here’s a massive media presence, everybody within the company is like, “Don’t go outside, don’t talk to reporters, don’t talk to people because they might be reporters pretending to be people,” and so I do it anyways. I totally went outside and started bumping elbows.
Sean Parker: Shawn and I snuck outside and were watching from across the street, just watching the spectacle.
Aaron Sittig: It was just a big sort of circus of people waiting for Lars to show up, wondering what was going to happen. Mostly supporters of Metallica, some detractors.
Jordan Ritter: There was a group of guys, really cool guys who were doing another start-up who had put together this massive poster that said, “RIAA = Master of Puppets.”
Howard King: We drove down whatever street that is to Napster’s headquarters, and we turned the corner, and there must have been five hundred newspeople there—I thought there would be ten reporters there. So again, we pull around the corner and see all the satellite poles coming off the trucks and all the press. It was a mob scene. It was incredible. Until then we had no idea what a big issue this was.
Lars Ulrich: We were not quite prepared for the shit storm that we became engulfed in.
Eileen Richardson: They pulled up and started bringing out all these boxes of paper.
Jordan Ritter: I think it was four boxes of usernames printed out in landscape mode, so you’ve got an even shorter part of the paper, one name per line on paper, and it was hysterical because like, “Hey, if you actually wanted to resolve this, you could have e-mailed it to us and we probably would have taken action and fixed it.”
Howard King: Sending over a disc with 322,000 infringements is what a lawyer would do. Why go quietly into the night? Why not let the world know what a disaster Napster was for artists? That was the whole point.
Ali Aydar: If we’re going to sit there and enter every IP address in and take it down, or every filename in it and take it down, that would have taken months. But if th
ey give us a CD, we’ll take it right down. Which is what they did. So the printouts were just for show, and they did a whole press conference in front of the front door of the building, and it was a whole scene.
Aaron Sittig: Lars started to grandstand a little bit and just yelled about how this is a terrible thing, and they couldn’t believe the betrayal of all these people who downloaded their music.
Jordan Ritter: Right, and they got this little dog standing by them, and then somebody put a Napster sticker on the dog! It was so fucking crazy, it was cool, it was unknowable, un-understandable, but exhilarating and wonderful and you really didn’t know what to expect. What was going to happen next? Is someone going to lose their shit and start a fistfight?
Lars Ulrich: It started off as a street fight, and then about a month later it was like, “Whoa! Look at this!” And then we were a little bit like a deer caught in headlights.
Sean Parker: It was the ultimate weird spectacle. All of a sudden we were in the middle of the media maelstrom, but from our perspective it doesn’t make sense.
Howard King: So then Lars, Lars’s manager Peter, and I went in and delivered the boxes.
Aaron Sittig: So of course we ran back inside the building and back up to see what was going to happen next.
Ali Aydar: I didn’t really care much for Lars, because he’s a fucking drummer, but whatever, and then here he is: the poster child for the boot coming down on our neck.
Sean Parker: Lars walks into the office with his black sunglasses on, and he basically just walked past us and delivered the boxes.
Ali Aydar: And now like we’re all kind of like looking at them, and it was a weird, interesting dynamic.
Aaron Sittig: Lars’s demeanor had totally changed. He went from being an angry guy downstairs, to being the sweetest guy. He’s really nice. He shook everyone’s hand.
Howard King: And we met Sean Parker and Shawn Fanning and we shook hands, and they were in awe of Lars. They were very respectful.
Sean Parker: At that time if you were a rock god, you were from another planet.
Aaron Sittig: We were all starstruck and happy to meet him, because we’re all music fans. And so we had a good conversation and it was really nice, and he dropped off the paperwork and they left.
Howard King: I don’t remember it being a long discussion, it was something like Lars saying, “Man, you know, you can’t do this to artists. This is what they live on!” I think his phrase was something like, “We got enough money to heat the pool and put gas in the Suburban, so this is for the other artists who need to sell records in the future.”
Jordan Ritter: Lars made a comment that I really appreciated. It was like, “You’re not the evil Man trying to take my shit from me, or trying to destroy the world, you’re just, you know, some really bright, cool kids.” I’m paraphrasing but this is what he said.
Howard King: You know it looked like these kids had a hobby and it took off and they were in kind of awe of what they created: “Oh, look at it, it’s just sharing, it’s like you lent an album to your next-door neighbor, they’ll never get us!” Then Napster brought some adults on board.
Eileen Richardson: The day Metallica came was like the day we switched over from me being CEO, to Hank Barry.
Sean Parker: Hank Barry was this copyright attorney from Silicon Valley.
Hank Barry: You could disagree with Metallica, or agree with them in terms of their position, but for me the most disappointing thing about that whole episode was that it ended up being about money. It was sort of cast as a battle on behalf of artists everywhere. But “artists everywhere” didn’t get any money out of it, although Metallica did, because eventually we settled the case.
Sean Parker: Lars and I have become really good friends. I was joking with him the other day, that he’s the only artist that actually made money off Napster.
Ali Aydar: So there are two lawsuits, one from Metallica and Dr. Dre, and one from the five major record labels at the time, both of them accusing us of vicarious copyright infringement. Which essentially means facilitating the massive infringement of their rights on their copyrights. The labels filed a motion for something called summary judgment, and summary judgment means “Judge, you decide right now, that Napster is guilty, without hearing all the evidence, without going through a proper trial, because it’s so obvious.” And so in those situations, the judge has various options. She could refuse that and go straight to trial. She could hear some arguments and then make a decision, or she could say, without argument, “Yes, Napster is guilty.” She decided to listen to arguments.
Hank Barry: And so everything at Napster, all the two years of litigation, was around this question of preliminary injunction. There was never any kind of a trial. There was never any evidence presented in the case, none. Although there was this gigantic poster of Sean Parker’s e-mail.
Hilary Rosen: It was Sean Parker’s e-mails that really ended up having them lose those early court battles.
Sean Parker (in an e-mail): Users will understand that they are improving their experience by providing information about their tastes without linking that information to a name or address or other sensitive data that might endanger them—especially since they are exchanging pirated music.
Sean Parker: Their point was that, “Well, we know all along that users were going to be pirating music.” That was beside the point. The point was that it was totally fine for us to operate a service where users shared files! It was no different than Google linking to a file.
David Boies: The use of the term piracy—I think gave the judge a way of focusing on something other than how the technology works.
Jordan Ritter: Parker’s e-mail, presented in discovery… The fucking dick!
Hank Barry: You know it looks bad, feels bad, it smells bad…
David Boies: And, as I tried to urge the judge, the question of whether the activity is lawful or unlawful is a matter for the courts to decide. It’s not supposed to be decided by the exuberant outbursts of teenagers, no matter how talented they may be at designing software. But I obviously didn’t get that point across adequately.
Ali Aydar: The labels painted us as bad actors, as people who don’t have good intentions, and instead of responding with, “We’re operating under this area of the copyright act and here’s why it’s legal,” David Boies decided to make the “Well, we don’t really know what’s being transferred” argument, right? And the labels are saying, “Come on, Judge, these guys totally know, it’s totally our content for free, these guys are totally facilitating this massive copyright infringement.”
Hank Barry: Boies is an amazing lawyer, but the bad news is he’s not a technologist, and he was in the position of having to make a technological argument, and at the end of the day David never really understood it.
Ali Aydar: And the judge from the bench, without even going back and thinking about it, said, “Napster is guilty.”
Hilary Rosen: The judge essentially said that it was not incumbent on us to tell Napster what was infringing; it was incumbent upon Napster to get permission for the works on their site. And that was a double problem for them. First they had to obviously get permission, but they also had to have technology that could read the digital files, so that they were not distributing infringing files.
Shawn Fanning: It was really surprising to me that we were being asked to function differently than all of the web-based search engines.
Hank Barry: And then we were trying to deal with the injunction and the outside reports were saying, “You know, despite your best efforts you’re really not doing a great job on complying with the injunction.”
David Boies: The judge had said she did not want to shut the system down. And yet, the scope of the injunction inevitably required the system to be shut down.
Ali Aydar: And of course the press was on top of this, and so the shut-down date was published everywhere. So everybody knew we were shutting down on a certain date, so before that date, our tra
ffic spiked.
Hilary Rosen: We won the first round in court, and they came to us and said, “Now we want to be licensed.” They wanted these sort of blanket license fees, but at the time there was no all-you-can-eat model and when the Napster team tried to create one, the pricing that they had come to the table with was really unrealistically small, and we had refused to allow them to continue to operate while they were trying to accomplish this, and ultimately they just ran out of time and money.
Sean Parker: Having now launched Spotify, I can attest to what it means when you first think that you’re going to get a deal done with the record labels, and you’re three weeks away from getting those licenses and launching. You’re really two years away.
Hank Barry: And so we decided to stop the sharing.
Jordan Ritter: So Ali and I are in the break room, on the first floor, and I’m sitting there depressed, he’s sitting there depressed, I’m like, “Ali, what the fuck are we going to do?”
Ali Aydar: Apparently I turned it off. I have no recollection of actually doing that, I have no recollection of that day, maybe it’s one of those things I just shoved deep into my unconscious, I don’t really know. I mean, I would be the person to do it.
Jordan Ritter: Napster had to end, because that’s what happens at the end of every revolution. They gather up the leaders, they line them up against the wall, and they fucking shoot them.
Sean Parker: I didn’t care about Napster as a company, I just wanted the idea to survive. I wanted unlimited access to all the world’s music; that was the public good.
Jordan Ritter: And the idea lives on, but the progenitors of that idea have to die.
Hank Barry: Afterward we found out that there were all these OpenNap servers still out there, and so the network was actually still working, even though we had shut everything off at our place. It’s kind of a wild outcome.
Ali Aydar: You had all of the offspring of Napster: LimeWire, Morpheus, Grokster—everybody’s getting their content from all these other sources, and not Napster anymore. So Napster doesn’t exist, but millions of people are still using all these other services.