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head of piracy enforcement. Napster set off Creighton’s alarm bells immediately. “FTP sites [those using powerful File Transfer Protocol commands] are nongraphical, non-user-friendly, and you can’t use them with a regular browser. IRC is really technical, but it’s more interactive—you can query for a specific file. Napster combined those services and brought the best aspects together. It was very robust and efficient,” Creighton said. “We thought it was really exciting.”

Creighton’s job had gotten a lot more complicated over his fifteen years at the RIAA. In the beginning, he was chasing counterfeiters of eight-track tapes. The bad guys weren’t too hard to find—they needed a half-dozen employees, a warehouse, and specialized duplication equipment worth as much as $250,000. Piracy back then cost the record industry about $250 million a year, a level that stayed constant until the mid-1990s. Then, as unencrypted MP3s made high-quality sound transferable more quickly, FTP sites began springing up, mostly at universities. Creighton sent his first threatening letter to an Internet site in 1997, then many more. Usually, a letter did the trick. For all of the eventual criticism about the trade group’s heavy-handed tactics, it filed fewer than a dozen lawsuits in the ten years before Napster. By 1998, Creighton was feeling good about the work he had done on FTP sites. Most of the high-speed Internet lines were at colleges, which were sensitive to threats about legal action and even the potential loss of federal funding for their communications networks. The Digital Millennium Copyright Act, written by Orrin Hatch’s Senate Judiciary Committee, helped matters further that year by setting out the rules of the road. Now the RIAA could inform an Internet service provider of infringing content under its control, and generally the company would cut off access. “The euphoria lasted a brief period,” said Creighton. IRC and other chat networks were multiplying, and Creighton had to hire more specialists to keep up. The RIAA office grew from thirty-five people to seventy in just a few years.

With Napster, Creighton began as he usually did, playing the good cop. “We didn’t want to come across as antitechnology or anti-consumer,” he said. John Fanning was the registered contact person for the site, and Creighton dropped him a reasonable e-mail on September 23, 1999. “I am writing to you to see if we could start a productive and mutually beneficial dialogue regarding your service and technology,” he wrote. “As

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