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pany would still win the lawsuit and that any filtering was a sellout. Shawn himself tried to keep quiet about his objections.

“There were times that the company has been forced due to litigation or other things to take paths that I didn’t think were ideal, and it was tough being associated with that,” Shawn said. “Especially with a lot of the publicity. Because I remember when we started filtering ineffectively, sort of overblocking, I was getting recognized a lot. Kids were coming up and saying why can’t I find this or why can’t I find that, and that was definitely rough, because I wasn’t involved in choosing whether to filter or determining how the filtering system should work, but I definitely felt the repercussions of that.”

Carey had never seen anything like the mess Napster was in. “The chaos inside the organization was just strangling,” he said. “It took me a week to figure out that everyone was operating based on fear—of the lawsuit, of management, of making a mistake. It was bizarre.” Kessler was in charge of the screening effort, and Barry had lost faith in his ability to pull it together. “The first thing Hank asked me to do was fire Eddie,” Carey said. “I said there’s no way I can ship if I fire Eddie. It’s all in his head.” After getting berated one time too many by Barry, Kessler quit in May. Barry realized that Carey had been right: With no Eddie, there was no chance. A three-day soap opera ensued, ending only when Barry apologized and asked Kessler to come back.

The high-speed filtering effort went down to the wire. Just before the June 28 hearing, Carey and the others had it working in the lab, with “duct tape and gum holding it together.” On June 27, Napster switched to the new system. As copyright-infringement notices poured in by mail, e-mail, and fax, the new audio-based system knocked out the protected songs, and the exhausted engineers congratulated each other. “The tenor of the conversation changed, to the system having a chance. And that would be the beginning of a possible settlement,” Carey said.

As the Napster crew kept checking the new system’s performance, they found a tiny percentage of errors—only 1 percent or 2 percent of the banned songs were getting through, mostly because of mistakes in the infringement notices. Try as they might, the engineers could not get the error rate down to zero. And Barry and Napster’s other lawyers were facing the possibility that Patel would hold them in contempt of court.