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Kessler was torn but eventually sided with the lawyers. “Something was going wrong,” he said. “I said we should take it down until it’s resolved.”

Napster took down the system voluntarily on July 1, 2001, as it kept hunting for bugs, cutting off what had grown to 2 million simultaneous users, close to AOL’s figures and an incredible technical achievement for such a small number of engineers and machines. Instinctively, Aydar felt the long fight was over. “Once we shut it down, we knew it was going to be hard to get it up again,” he said. “It was like trying to repair the leg of a racehorse. You just shoot it. But everyone felt like it was Napster, so we can’t let it go.”

At a crucial July 11 hearing, Napster lawyer Steve Cohen told Patel that Napster could relaunch the system and weed out 99 percent of the improper songs. But Patel was adamant. “It’s not good enough until every effort has been made to, in fact, get zero tolerance,” she ruled. “She was furious,” Kessler said. “She said it’s got to be perfect. I said I can’t build a system where I can guarantee that it will be perfect.” Unable to promise a faultless system, Napster stayed shut. An appeal to the Ninth Circuit arguing that Patel’s zero-tolerance standard was too high was rejected. And despite assurances to fans that it would soon be back, Napster’s second-generation system for authorized recordings wouldn’t go live until a beta test, free of major-label content, in early 2002.

After so many false deaths, Napster was truly gone, or at least in an indefinite coma. By now, tens of millions of people had been conditioned to expect free and easily accessible music, and they were willing to hunt around for new tools to use. Napster’s would-be successors, meanwhile, had had plenty of time to work out the kinks in their systems. The early versions of Gnutella had difficulty in scaling to handle massive traffic. It was also slow, and it had bugs that were difficult to overcome without some user sophistication. But millions tried anyway: The number of hits to Gnutella websites ran into the tens of millions. Litigation would also target Gnutella, but its lack of centralization made it close to impossible to shut down. As Shawn had feared, the open-source effort made steady and eventually profound improvements to Gnutella. Derivatives including Amsterdam-based Kazaa and Nashville-based MusicCity Morpheus took hold in 2001, collectively surpassing the traffic Napster had at its peak. As with Gnutella, there was no practical way to stop them. The