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in the case, would be subject to a protective order, barring them from appearing in the public court file or the press. There were two sets of documents at issue. One included the contract for Shawn’s initial transfer of the rights to his invention to the company. Shawn had testified at his deposition that he knew he had signed something of the kind, but “he was generally unable to articulate precisely what it was,” the record-industry lawyer said at the hearing. The other documents recounted John Fanning’s sales of his stock. Pulgram argued that the two documents weren’t relevant. “All this is is an effort to try to get to Mr. Fanning personally, to get private information about to whom he sold stock,” Pulgram told Patel. Pulgram didn’t give another logical, though legally insufficient, reason for fighting the request: The documents would show just how little Shawn had received, and how many hundreds of thousands of dollars his uncle had made from the piracy of others. Patel ordered the documents turned over.

Other documents went the way of the shredder. Napster was moving to new offices in Redwood City, and on the eve of the move chief financial officer Lyn Jensen sent a companywide e-mail telling employees to keep copies of documents that might be required for court. All the others, she wrote, should be dumped in the “large locked bins that have the words ‘shred works’ on the side.” Moving offices added to the stress of the Napster team. Most of them thought their lawyers would defeat the attempt at a preliminary injunction, but they couldn’t be sure. Napster’s users weren’t sure, either, and they poured onto the system in numbers that as much as doubled every few weeks. On July 24, one of Napster’s outside public-relations staffers, Jill Mango, e-mailed a bulletin to her colleagues. “We have finally reached full pop culture saturation,” she wrote. “I just got a phone call from the fact-checkers at Who Wants to be a Millionaire. Q: Dr. Dre and Metallica recently filed lawsuits alleging copyright infringement against which Internet MP3 sharing program? Final answer: Napster.”

HIGH NOON CAME TWO DAYS LATER, at 2 P.M. on Wednesday, July 26, 2000, in Patel’s eighteenth-floor courtroom across the street from San Francisco’s black-and-gold-domed City Hall. Journalists and other spectators had been lining up since 10 A.M., and two hundred were there