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jockey Alan Freed. And he trotted out three young people from backstage, saying they were students who had managed to download nearly six thousand songs in two days from “easily accessible websites.” It later emerged that one of the three was a technology professional, not a student, and that most of the songs had come directly from friends via instant messages. If those songs had come from purchased CDs, they might well have been sent legally. (Greene himself was forced to resign after the academy paid a reported $650,000 to head off a former executive’s threatened sex-harassment suit.)

Allied with the more powerful and increasingly nervous movie industry, the record executives returned to Congress with their own demands. Before, Napster’s army of users had helped the upstart get a warm reception on Capitol Hill, where Sen. Orrin Hatch had threatened the industry with legislation if it didn’t open its digital vaults. As the courts discredited Napster and Hatch lost his committee chairmanship, nothing serious passed Congress. Now the momentum was reversing in a post-Napster backlash. As the threat to all manner of intellectual property rose, the entertainment companies experimented with new encryption techniques, including some that prevented legally purchased CDs from being ripped at all—even though ripping itself had been determined to be legal. Rep. Howard Berman of Los Angeles, a Democrat, went so far as to introduce a bill to allow entertainment companies to hack into consumer PCs and delete copyright-infringing files offered on peer-to-peer networks. Even if such a bill made it out of Congress, it was hard to see the wisdom of declaring war on hackers, instead of offering more cheap content to stimulate demand.

Soon came the spectacle of two of the country’s most powerful industries, entertainment and technology, colliding head-on. Disney CEO Michael Eisner testified in Congress, attacking Silicon Valley for profiting from piracy-driven demand for better and faster machines and connections. “There are people in the tech industry,” Eisner charged ominously, “who believe that piracy is the killer app for their business.” Intel CEO Craig Barrett returned the fire, telling legislators that such restrictions on equipment would stifle innovation and prevent legitimate activity. “Peer-to-peer technologies constitute a basic functionality of the computing environment today,” Barrett and Microsoft CEO Steve

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