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Wayne Chang, the seventeen-year-old self-appointed Napster standard-bearer, went much further. To start with, he urged the company to sue Paulson for using the word Napster in his domain name. "Who the fuck does he think he is?" he wrote to Barber. Then Chang did something else. He hacked into the infrastructure company that was hosting Savenapster.com and made Paulson's Web-hosting bill appear two months overdue. And he hacked the site itself, adding a new story to the press section bearing the headline I BACKSTABBED NAPSTER. Chang was proud of the feat, and he e-mailed Ritter to brag. After suggesting that Ritter try to visit the Savenapster site "while it's still defaced," he added: "I also changed the pw [password] back on the shell, so chad won't think it's a server problem. . . . ps: delete this message." Ritter stayed mum, and when Paulson complained to Napster about the hack, Barber wrote: "I give you my word that no one affiliated with this organization had anything to do with it. I apologize for what must be a very frustrating situation." Paulson complained to the FBI, which was unable to solve the attack. In an interview, Chang said he would neither confirm nor deny responsibility. Paulson later quit school and joined the small online music firm Listen.com, then moved to Los Angeles to join Capitol Records' digital efforts.

The media circus around Napster hit a climax on May 3, 2000, courtesy of Metallica lawyer Howard King, who vowed publicly to shut the service down. In a spectacle designed for the television cameras, King and Lars Ulrich arrived at Napster's San Mateo office in a limousine bearing thirteen boxes containing the names of hundreds of thousands of Napster users who were offering Metallica songs. King demanded that the users be banned from the service. With advance notice that Ulrich was coming, Napster gathered its own supporters to appear. Several held a banner that read "RIAA = Master of Puppets," a reference to the Metallica album of the same name. Others obliged the cameras by taking sledgehammers to Metallica's compact discs. Still more took advantage of the heavy media turnout by bringing posters touting Gnutella or other sites. The new generation gap got its loudest display when Ulrich spoke from the podium. Protesters shouted at him to shut up and called him a sellout. "Fuck you, Lars," offered one. "It's our music too!"

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