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Fanning, and Kessler as the inventors. “We didn’t want to have a fight with John,” Kessler said in an interview. “It didn’t make sense.”

With Shawn, Frackman launched on a long series of questions about what MP3 files he had downloaded personally, from which service, before and after Napster came into being. Shawn pleaded to having a bad memory. He said he couldn’t recall the song names, the artists, or even the type of music. One live Led Zeppelin track was all he could remember clearly from before Napster, he said. As Frackman pressed on, Annette Hurst, an attorney there to protect Shawn personally, grew nervous and began objecting that Shawn’s personal actions were irrelevant to a case accusing Napster of contributing to users’ copyright violations. “What you’re trying to do is build a direct claim of copyright infringement against this young man,” she complained. Frackman scoffed. “You’re saying I can’t do that?” he asked. “Whether the man who created Napster himself has committed copyright infringement is not relevant?” The legal fencing continued until the two lawyers agreed to take it up with the judge later on.

In the meantime, Shawn testified that the rap songs on his Napster-issued laptop were ripped from CDs he owned. Frackman appeared incredulous that Shawn had neither searched the Napster system for other tracks by Snoop Doggy Dogg and Ice Cube, nor offered his ripped MP3s for sharing. “Part of it is the bandwidth,” Shawn said. “We don’t share things from the office.” Pressed about his knowledge of copyright law, Shawn said he didn’t understand it very well, and he conceded that might be another reason that he refrained from sharing music himself. “I would say it concerned me some, so I was cautious personally,” he said. He said that he was also concerned about the potential for piracy on Napster, and that the removal policy was intended to address that. The climax of the daylong interview should have been the early brainstorming documents about Napster’s strategy and problems. But when Frackman showed Shawn one of the most damaging papers, asserting that “Napster brings about the death of the CD,” Shawn said he didn’t recall seeing it before. That was a good answer: Patel later wrote that the lack of positive identification forced her to disregard the document, which she called a “smoking gun.” After the deposition, Shawn felt he had done his part well. “It’s safe to say I was nervous about it, but once I got there it was

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