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went even further in private, taking the argument to an administrator in an IRC chat, which was how most sensitive Napster business was conducted. “Napster himself isn’t making any money off this, so why is rick selling out?” Chang asked. “He’s not selling out,” the administrator replied. Besides, “Napster makes plenty of money, if you’re talking about the person.” Chang wouldn’t back down, writing that “banners from the site are unappreciated,” and accusing the administrators themselves of “cashing out.” The administrator called Chang a “kiss-ass,” and Chang signed off with a cheery “okay sellout.” When Ritter got wind of the exchange in March 2000, he ordered Chang to drop the matter “or else.”

Rick Fletcher and several other moderators complained to Lathoud and Ritter that Chang should lose his moderator status for erratic behavior. Once, Chang got carried away with the new, white color of Napster’s interface for users, which replaced the original black. Chang tried to get a rise out of the moderators on the e-mail list by sending a message touting “WHITE POWER—wayne of KKK . . . (even though im asian).” Fletcher wrote Ritter in April that “more or less all the admins are really wanting ttol [Chang’s nickname] to be demodded,” or demoted from moderator, for posting information on unreleased versions of Napster, the KKK joking, and “near constant bad judgment calls.”

And Chang angered Napster executives by showing up too often in the press and saying the wrong things when he did. One incident occurred after the release of Wrapster, a program that allowed non-MP3 files to travel through the Napster system disguised as MP3s. Wrapster permitted users to hoodwink the system and share anything else they wanted—text documents, pictures, even movies. Since the bandwidth that Napster was eating up already clogged the networks at many companies, the advent of unrestrained video-swapping on such a scale could have caused such havoc that the government might have been forced to intervene. Inside Napster, executives decided to ignore Wrapster and hope it didn’t get too much attention. But Chang was ready with a quote, accusing Wrapster of “ripping off” Napster and “taking it further.” Chang finally lost his moderator status. But with no one else paying as much attention as he had to policing Napster’s publicly accessible message board, the posters went nuts in early May. An average visitor saw posts like “I JUST TOOK A SHIT” and “WHY DO JEWS HAVE SUCH BIG NOSES?” and felt compelled to write to