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ated an opportunity for people with credible ideas to explore those ideas. We’ll see which of those will bear fruit.”

MOST OF THE ORIGINAL REVOLUTIONARIES weren’t around to see what followed them.

Eileen Richardson, the first of the Napster leaders to go, was exhausted and ready to move on in mid-2000, when Hummer Winblad came in. She wasn’t prepared for what came next. Three months after her departure, on the heels of the preliminary injunction and its temporary stay, Business Week ran a long cover story on Napster that can most charitably be described as revisionist history. Largely reflecting the viewpoints of John Fanning and an unnamed former executive who sounds a lot like the terminated Bill Bales, the article made numerous errors. It said Sean Parker had “helped write” the beta version of Napster. It said that John Fanning had called Wilson Sonsini’s Andrew Bridges about copyright law early on and that “those conversations” had given Fanning confidence in Napster’s chances in court. In fact, Bridges had declined to represent Napster: He had only explained his arguments in the record-industry suit over the Rio portable MP3 player. For advice on Napster, Bridges had referred Fanning to another lawyer, who had referred Fanning to Seth Greenstein, of a lesser-known firm in Washington. Business Week cited unnamed sources who reported that Richardson had been heard “scream-
ing into the phone” at record-company executives, when in fact her only phone conversations had been with litigious RIAA officials.

Most devastating to Richardson’s reputation was what passed in the article for expert opinion on what had gone wrong. It said she was “combative, inexperienced, and unable to develop a business model palatable to the record industry.” It said Richardson had rejected venture-capital offers in 1999 and was able to secure funding only in May 2000, by implication because of Richardson’s unexplained failure to articulate a business model. In fact, any plans about how to profit would have been pounced on by record-industry lawyers as proof of Napster’s gain from illegal activity. John Fanning, on the other hand, was depicted as Napster’s dedicated “chief business strategist,” one whose only obvious error, besides relying