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Hank Barry with Bertelsmann, in refusing to approve the purchase, is causing seventy people to lose their jobs.” Shawn was disgusted, too. Not only did Barry and Hummer decide to play chicken, he complained to a friend, they decided to play chicken with a Mack truck. Parker was even more blunt: “When parasites kill their hosts, they die as well,” he said.

But there was still one more emergency backup plan for the system Shawn had hatched in his dorm room. “A cat has nine lives,” Hilbers had said in his farewell e-mail. The bankruptcy filing would wipe out Napster’s legal liability and Hummer Winblad’s control, along with its investors’ equity. And then Bertelsmann, as the largest creditor, would be first in line to buy the assets. Middelhoff planned to rehire Shawn, Hilbers, and forty more.

In the harsh media glare from the resignations and investor criticism, Barry went back to the office and called Bertelsmann’s Joel Klein. After getting the bid up to $8 million for Napster’s creditors, he agreed to the Chapter 11 sale. There were no promises of releases from personal liability. The two companies announced the deal on Friday, May 17. “We believe in the future of peer-to-peer,” Middelhoff said. “This is not the end. This is the beginning of a new Napster. If this is the only way to get it done, this is how we get it done. If it takes two or three months, so what.” Middelhoff said Bertelsmann would launch “a legitimate peer-to-peer service, either with the brand and the technology of Napster or not.”

Barry and Hummer resigned from the board. At Bertelsmann’s direction, Napster rehired its leaders, keeping a skeleton staff of eighteen from among what had been more than one hundred employees. Hilbers rejoined as CEO and the sole director. On June 3, Napster filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in Delaware, reporting that as of April 30, it had $7.9 million in assets and $101 million in liabilities, not counting what it might owe the record labels. The list of creditors ran in three small-print columns for fifty-nine pages, from A-A Lock and Alarm to ZZ Top. Standing out among the technical suppliers, employees, and restaurants was David Boies’s law firm, owed more than $2 million. Bertelsmann was due $91 million. Napster assumed that Bertelsmann’s pledge for $8 million more, for an ostensible value of $99 million, would top any competing bids for its assets.

Other technology companies by then had released secure peer-to-peer