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“PROGRESS USER BASE TO X# OF CONCURRENT USERS. GET TOP TIER VC FUNDING. PERFORM TESTS TO DETERMINE DEAL PRESENTED TO SONY. DO A DEAL WITH SONY. DO A DEAL WITH OTHER LABELS UNDER SIMILAR TERMS. DETERMINE WHETHER TO BECOME A PORTAL OR INTERMEDIATE INFRASTRUCTURE. LATHER. RINSE. REPEAT.”

The crew planned to target Sony first because the company’s consumer-electronics base might tempt it to tolerate piracy more, Parker said. As much as any document that has emerged, the October plan also reveals a strategy that comes close to a dictionary definition of extortion—using threats to extract money. By exploiting the obvious Napster advantage—“users know that by connecting to Napster, they have access to any music they want, absolutely free”—the author explains that the record industry will eventually be forced to negotiate in order to reach Napster’s audience and get data about its habits: “We use the hook of our existing approach to grow our user base, and then use this user base coupled with advanced technology to leverage the record companies into a deal. The fact that we grow to 4 or 5 million simultaneous users with millions of songs (through the inherently viral nature of the Napster concept) can hardly be ignored by Sony or EMI.”

The paper also proposes a campaign of subterfuge. Napster should not attack the record industry directly, instead stalling it until the company grew big enough to force a deal. “The key is to co-exist with the record industry, at least temporarily,” it says. “The record industry is essential to our efforts.” And the deal itself would be a trap: The plan was to “make Napster key to promotion, allowing us to ultimately bypass the record industry entirely.” The document makes plain that the key to getting rich was to get as many users as quickly as possible, and that the good news was that this was happening already. “We already know we can grow the user base. The direction taken after this point is trivial. We can sell our user base out to a portal for a few hundred million, or take the following steps to create a billion-dollar company.” Those steps included hiring top managers and programmers and, again, getting top-flight VC funding.

There was one solid reason for not choosing a business model that aimed at profitability. Many of the copyright laws and their interpretations by the courts hinged on where the money went. Taping a record for