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affairs and extravaganzas like the launch party thrown by revenue-deprived Respond.com Inc., which handed out full-size bottles of Veuve Clicquot champagne to all attendees.

At the Bubble Lounge that night, most members of the press in attendance listened to a few sentences about Xtime. What they really wanted was Shawn, and Murdock had assured many in advance that they could have some time with the wunderkind. After a while passed with no sightings of the prime attraction, Murdock went around looking. Alarmed to learn that he wasn’t even in the building, Murdock asked some Napster executives and learned the harsh truth: Shawn wasn’t coming, for the simple reason that he wasn’t even close to twenty-one. If he was going to be in a bar, it sure as hell wasn’t going to be with half the area’s technology press assembled as witnesses.

IN MID-NOVEMBER, THE DIGITAL MUSIC magazine Webnoize said the RIAA intended to sue Napster. Wired confirmed the report, citing an RIAA spokeswoman who said the trade group had repeatedly sampled what was available for download on the service and found that “virtually all file traffic is unauthorized.” And spokeswoman Lydia Pelliccia all but called Richardson a liar for implying that she was negotiating. “We made several attempts over the last few weeks to communicate,” Pelliccia said. “Our urgent requests for a meeting were not taken seriously. We really had no other option but to file litigation.”

Richardson retreated into “aw shucks” mode. She said that the threat of a lawsuit was unfair, since Napster hadn’t officially launched yet and was just beta testing. “We are freaking four months old,” she complained. Wisely, she stuck to strategy and refused to say how many users Napster had, since the figure would totally undercut the posture of a little start-up under attack by a mammoth industry. The pose helped recruit legions of Napster evangelists, who filled Internet message boards and chat rooms with anti-industry rants. Since many knew that musicians got a tiny percentage of the industry’s take, they had an easy target. And with little grasp of the law or Napster’s history, the firm seemed like one of the good guys.

The RIAA finally filed the lawsuit on December 6, 1999, in San

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