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just the beginning. Other key employees brought in under his leadership were also well familiar with angry investors, the courts, and the cops long before Napster's landmark fight with the record industry. Their roles too have never been examined. All told, the undisclosed chaos, betrayal, and dissension within Napster made the record-industry lawsuit look like a friendly game of chess. And it is somehow fitting that the rapid development of this weapon for allowing consumers to take control away from the entertainment-industry giants also illustrates so dramatically the power that a few individual entrepreneurs can wield in a post-Internet society, for good or for ill.

The second reason that Napster merits book-length treatment is how different it was from all the other excesses of the Internet bubble. Napster wasn't selling pet food or baby products online. The fastest-growing business of all time, Napster had an innovative technology, true to the Net's roots, that fired up not only the computers of the music-craving masses but also the imaginations of CEOs at some of the biggest companies on the planet. And driven by leaders who kept doubling Napster's bet, it pushed the edge until it defined where the lines would be drawn on some of the most important political and economic issues of the day, including digital piracy, consumer rights, freedom of speech, and the future shape of the Net itself. As I write, the leaders of Hollywood and Silicon Valley, two of the most powerful industries anywhere, are jousting on Capitol Hill over whether widespread anticopying mechanisms will be mandated in the computers of the future. All that from the mind of an idealistic seventeen-year-old from Cape Cod who got some very bad advice.

The third reason nearly contradicts the second. While Napster was different, it also epitomized what went wrong at the hottest spot in capitalism in the historic boom at the turn of the century. It was exactly like everything else that was happening, only much, much more so. In Napster's case, billionaire venture capitalists were willing to put millions of dollars behind something that was not just foolish, as so many start-ups were, but something that they had already concluded was illegal. If the investment philosophy that powered Napster was badly overcharged, so were the characters that led it. But they too were archetypes of a remarkable era. A little rougher around the edges and a little more reckless, to be sure, but the sort of people who seemed almost genetically

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