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designed to take advantage of the mass mania that surrounded them. Read correctly, the story of Napster proves that the influx of investment money credited with spreading technology faster and wider than ever before also corrupted the evolution of that technology, provoking a brutal backlash.

This book is based on hundreds of interviews with virtually everyone who was important at Napster and many of the people they came in contact with, from their childhood years through Napster's dealings with media titan Bertelsmann AG and the company's bankruptcy. (Bertelsmann also owns the publisher of this book.) My dealings with John Fanning were more limited. They included authorized interviews with his company's lawyer and publicist, his hanging up the phone and shutting a door in my face, and his response to an e-mailed list of questions, an answer that consisted chiefly of his claim that the questions alone were grounds for a lawsuit.

My work is supported by police and court records from the states of California, Massachusetts, Delaware, Pennsylvania, and Washington. I also have relied on scores of confidential internal company documents, nonpublic depositions and other material from the legal battles, and thousands of e-mails from within Napster, the recording industry's trade group, and elsewhere. To avoid a mind-numbing excess of endnotes, you can assume that unless I say otherwise, when I refer to such a document, I have read it. Likewise, oral statements in quotes are from author interviews unless the endnotes say differently. Reconstructed speeches that are not from a court transcript or tape and that I did not personally hear are usually from the recollection of the speaker. There are some instances when a listener is the source. Whenever possible, these recollections have been confirmed by the other parties, and any conflicts have been resolved by the elimination of the material or by noting the discrepancy.

Because nearly all my reporting required substantial help from others, I owe almost everyone named in it a debt of gratitude. I would especially like to thank those who spent many days with me, some of them painful, to make sure I had the facts right, knowing that they themselves would not emerge unscathed. For exceptional bravery, I commend Napster's first Silicon Valley CEO, Eileen Richardson, founding developer Jordan Ritter, and cofounder Sean Parker, among others. Of the many good people

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