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Beezer, who had asked Schroeder for the task, writing the fifty-three-page opinion on behalf of his colleagues. The panel found that Napster’s users were indeed violating music copyrights, just as Patel had ruled. The Audio Home Recording Act didn’t apply. The VCR case didn’t help much either, because Napster had an ongoing role in its users’ behavior. And the judges agreed that Napster was likely to be found to be contributing to its users’ copyright violations, since its worth would rise with the number of users it drew. “The district court did not err: Napster, by its conduct, knowingly encourages and assists the infringement of plaintiffs’ copyrights,” Beezer wrote. The judges accepted Patel’s finding that Napster was hurting CD sales. And the panel said that Napster could police its system to locate copyright-infringing material, just as it blocked people who misused the system in other ways.

The only thing the appeals court told Patel to change was the way she crafted the injunction. Patel had wanted Napster to make sure that each file offered for transfer didn’t violate a copyright. The appeals court, on the other hand, moved the burden back toward the labels. Napster would still have to police its system to the best of its ability, but the record labels would have to submit the names of files with infringing works. Possibly the result of a compromise among the judges, the court may not have realized that it was calling for a logistical nightmare. As it noted elsewhere, Napster’s internal documents showed it stood to win if the labels had to report every file, because each would probably be gone by the time Napster got around to disabling it, with another user’s unblocked version of the same song taking its place.

Still, it was a resounding victory for the record industry. “The court of appeals found that the injunction is not only warranted, but required,” the RIAA’s Hilary Rosen said. “And it ruled in our favor on every legal issue presented.” The ruling also made it less likely that Napster could make a deal with labels besides Bertelsmann, Schmidt acknowledged. At a San Francisco press conference, Barry vowed to ask for a rehearing and to appeal to the Supreme Court if necessary. And he amplified his calls for pressure on Congress. “We encourage members of our community to contact their representatives to let Congress know how much Napster means to them,” he said. Shawn, meanwhile, said he was working on a