📸 Photo

to reserve the ability for massive bans to the next step up in the community hierarchy, the dozen or so administrators. The administrators reported to a supervolunteer named Martin Lathoud, who served as the manager of moderators, or MoM, and who took his orders from Ritter. At times, disputes among the moderators would bump all the way up the chain of the command until they were resolved.

A RECURRING FLASHPOINT WAS A seventeen-year-old Haverhill, Massachusetts, high school student named Wayne Chang. Chang, the hacker son of the owners of two Chinese restaurants, knew Shawn from his earlier days as "Napster," the fellow hacker. He found out about Napster the program early and took to it with a passion. After being made a chat-room moderator, Chang suggested to Shawn that the company also host a message board on its website for discussions that would be open to everyone, no matter what server and accompanying chat rooms they were connected to. Shawn agreed and put Chang in charge of the message board, which was visible to any Web visitor. That exposure put Chang in an unusually sensitive position, since the messages posted by Napster users included tirades against the record industry and open support of piracy, statements that would come back to haunt Napster in court. In one, a user wrote: "We all know it's illegal. We just don't think it's wrong." And the messages sometimes included recommendations for Napster competitor Gnutella, which Chang deleted.

Like many good revolutionaries, Chang feuded with others whose devotion wasn't up to his standards. One frequent rival for the evangelism crown was Rick Fletcher, who had been running an unofficial Napster Frequently Asked Questions site on his own. The Napster FAQ was incredibly useful to novice users, and Ritter tried for months to get the company to purchase the site and give Fletcher a modest salary. He succeeded only after another dot-com made a bid for Fletcher and his work. Before that happened, and before Fletcher had made a dime from Napster for his efforts, he decided to make a little money by selling annoying pop-up ads on the Napster FAQ site. This outraged the puritans, and a debate raged on the moderator e-mail list over whether Napster should drop its link to Fletcher's unofficial page or take other action. Chang