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used to. “I’m sure if he hadn’t played StarCraft, he would have gotten fed,” Napster cofounder Sean Parker said. “But John Fanning has a way of being really stubborn.”

Shawn shared his family’s love of a good time. But where Fanning could be boisterous, his nephew was inward-looking and serious. It was while he was working at Fanning’s company that Shawn expanded on his early taste for computing. “I was just getting into programming, so I spent a lot of my time just fiddling with projects and hanging out. I have a really fond memory of that time, but I think I could have taken better advantage of it in terms of learning,” Shawn said. “Eventually I transitioned into doing some programming for the Web back end. I built the Web store. I was doing a lot of network programming and Unix programming and stuff. I was around computer guys, so it gave me a chance to learn.”

It was also then that Shawn discovered what would make him famous: MP3 digital music files he found through Internet Relay Chat, the hangout of choice for budding Internet programmers, hackers, and wanna-bes. Invented in Finland in 1988, IRC is a form of mass instant-messaging. In a channel, members type and send messages in real time to anyone who is monitoring that channel, and they can switch to private interactions. In the late 1990s, the IRC system spawned thousands of channels on every topic conceivable. Some were devoted to MP3s, where users traded music. Others focused on free software or pirated programs. Some of the channels were closed, while others were open to anyone who stumbled onto them.

It was on one of the open channels, devoted to minor hacker exploits and other things geek, that Shawn first ran into Sean Parker in 1996. As Shawn learned more and worked himself up the IRC hacker hierarchy, he got invited to join a private IRC channel called w00w00, which would play a key role in Napster’s development. W00w00 was for hackers and others interested in security issues who knew what they were doing, having already cut their teeth elsewhere. It wasn’t full of kids who pulled off hacking attacks by running scripts of code they had downloaded elsewhere. But it also wasn’t for the established old-school hackers, who kept to themselves for fear of exposure. (The term hacker has two

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