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helped the other side. And Napster Inc. took something back from the dialogue as well, eventually hiring the team that developed Macster for use on Apple machines.

The struggle against open-sourcers still flared up from time to time, most notably in the case of Stanford University senior David Weekly, who had briefly alarmed the record industry earlier with his mass MP3 postings. Weekly reverse-engineered the Napster protocol and wrote code mimicking it that he posted on his website. Engineering vice president Eddie Kessler decided that Weekly had violated the terms of Napster's license for all users, which forbade reverse engineering. Kessler wrote to Weekly and ordered him to take the posting down. Weekly did so, then helpfully e-mailed the NapDev effort instructions on how to find copies of what he had written. “I'm not going to let them bully me!” Weekly wrote. “And remember: linking to documents is perfectly kosher. Looks like someone's already made a copy at http://lovenapster.tripod.com.”

The open-source Napster effort became a natural place for fairly sophisticated discussions about nontechnological matters, including morality and ways to avoid copyright liability. After many Napster users were banned for offering Metallica tracks, some of them blundered onto the NapDev mailing list as well in their quest to get reconnected. “Is there any other way to get back on or where is another MP3 sharing site?” one young AOL user asked. That ticked off a number of the hard-working open-source programmers, one of whom shot back: “This is a developers list, not a piracy assistance hotline.” But someone else did tell the requester what to do.

After it emerged that the Napster protocol temporarily recorded individual users' computer addresses, called IP addresses, a debate in the group ensued over whether Napster was putting its user base at risk for legal action. “I think it's a damned huge security flaw,” wrote NapDev subscriber Ian Brown. “If the Recording Industry Association of America decided to really go after Napster, it would be a cinch for them to write some software that automatically trawled all clients logged in to a given server for illegal content, then start legal action against the person.”

What Brown and the others didn't know was that Napster was worried about the same thing. Looking for an answer, it had begun talking with Zero-Knowledge Systems Inc., which made software for anony-