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and when Perrelli and Parker told them about Napster, they were receptive. They also knew something about digital music: Scott had decided he liked MP3s but had run into availability problems. Like Shawn, Scott had done something about it. He knocked out a program to search for MP3 files automatically and bring them back to his home computer. The big drawback was that the program didn’t discriminate, and Scott didn’t like most of what it came back with.

In June 1999, Parker brought Shawn and John Fanning to meet the Shinns in their basement in Centreville, Virginia. “I knew nothing about them,” Scott said later. “Parker said, ‘I got these guys I want you to meet.’” Scott agreed because he was curious and because the potential for a big payoff in digital music was increasingly obvious. America Online, the Internet-access behemoth based a few miles away, had just plunked down a total of $400 million for Internet-radio firm Spinner Networks Inc. and for Nullsoft, the small maker of MP3 player Winamp run by Justin Frankel and Rob Lord. That kind of money would certainly be enough to justify blowing off Cisco and staying close to home. The Shinns hit it off immediately with Shawn and Parker. As they talked, Scott mentioned that he had hosted Internet bulletin boards on a local digital-art network called Ice.org, on which Parker had chatted five years earlier as a precocious teen. And without knowing Shawn’s real name, the Shinns had run into him as well, on IRC channels covering security issues. (Later, when Scott discovered that Ritter was involved at Napster, he had another small-world moment: He knew of Ritter by his reputation as a security expert and server architect.) Finally, Scott had heard about Shawn and Parker, again only by their IRC handles, after they had duped a friend of his who was unwisely running a multiuser game from his U.S. State Department computer. “They schooled my friend, who is pretty bright,” Scott said.

“Do you like MP3s?” Shawn asked. “Yeah,” Scott said, “check this out.” Scott showed him the search-and-retrieval program, or “bot,” and Shawn showed Scott Napster. Scott’s first reaction was that it took too much work: You had to type in the name of the song you were looking for. But the idea was “pretty cool,” he told Shawn. “I need to marry it to my bot.” For half an hour, Shawn and the Shinns had a Vulcan mind meld. “We kind of geeked out on how it worked,” Scott said. “I had seen