📸

Francisco’s U.S. District Court, and it painted a different picture for those who took the time to read it. Filed by Los Angeles lawyer Russell Frackman and others on behalf of every major record company, the suit accused Napster of contributory and vicarious copyright infringement. “In an effort to ensure its users a safe haven for piracy, Napster promises and delivers user anonymity, and even boasts that it does not maintain logs of activity or other information that could be subpoenaed to reveal the identities of its users,” the suit said. And whatever claims Napster made about promoting the new music, “the sound recordings reproduced and distributed are not obscure recordings of unknown or unsigned artists. Quite the contrary, nearly every hit song by every significant recording artist can be found on Napster.” In answer to the question of how Napster was profiting from others’ illegal copying, the suit said the company was planning to attract advertising and investment money. “Thus, Napster is building a business on—and seeks to profit from—the daily, massive infringement it enables and encourages.”

The industry came well armed with evidence. It showed how Napster was involved in every step of the process, tracking when users logged on and off and steering them to the desired file by artist, song title, and connection speed. If a song disappeared because its owner logged off, Napster would find another copy of the file and resume the download from there. Worst of all, the company had bragged to users that they could “forget wading through page after page of unknown artists.” The suit attached a list of a couple hundred songs available on Napster, including cuts by Elvis Presley, the Beatles, Jimi Hendrix, Bob Dylan, and Bruce Springsteen. Since the statutory penalties for copyright infringement maxed out at $100,000 per work infringed, two hundred songs meant at least $20 million in potential damages. If the court determined that each copy of a given song was a separate infringement, the figure could reach the trillions of dollars. To early inquiries about its defenses, Napster said mainly that it hoped to settle.

Her protestations to the contrary notwithstanding, Richardson had been expecting the suit. And she correctly predicted that it would put Napster on the world map, teaching more teenagers and young adults where to go for free hit music. The number of users on the system at the same time grew from about 50,000 when the suit was filed to nearly

📸