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airtime. But even he found it tough going. "We had to balance being excited about it with having to represent the company well. You wanted to have a personality and be seen as having a hot brand. But at the same time, there was all this pressure to act respectable," Parker said. "It was always a struggle. We were constantly censoring ourselves: Certain words couldn't be used. A lot of it felt very forced. We hadn't developed a really solid facade, and we hadn't really established who we were." The coverage alerted even viewers in remote areas to the desirability and ease of use of the program.

Napster didn't want any more enemies, so it largely stayed out of the fight with universities over access to the system. Instead, it hoped that students would do battle for it. "We can't help the fact that everyone lovez Napster," one moderator wrote to his peers. "No worries, after they block access to napster, they will hear about it from students/staff."

Many students, even those who had collected hundreds or thousands of MP3s on their computers, merely grumbled. But at Indiana University, where a ban took effect after Napster's consumption of campus bandwidth neared 85 percent, a computer-science sophomore named Chad Paulson did something about it. In early February, he started a group called Students Against University Censorship and launched a petition drive. With Napster secretly paying the registration fee, he took the Web domain name Savenapster.com. The petition quickly gathered twenty thousand signatures and may have prompted Indiana, Yale, and other schools to bring Napster back, though another factor was work on a more efficient second-generation Internet system. A natural politician, Paulson was effective because he used neutral language and criticized the universities in an area of historic sensitivity for them, casting the dispute as a matter of free-speech rights on campus.

"Universities often overlook the student when making crucial decisions such as the ban of certain Internet privileges," Paulson wrote on his website. "Higher education in America should be free of censorship and complete administrative control." In his press interviews, Paulson conceded that many Napster users were looking for copyrighted material, but he argued that the innocent shouldn't be punished along with the guilty. Paulson was also honest when he said he wasn't using the system for piracy himself. A member of several bands while in high school, he used