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In late December, Frankel told Shawn that Gnutella was coming. Shawn ran into the Napster office and started shouting.

“Justin Frankel’s working on something that’s going to blow us away!” Shawn told Ritter and the other engineers. Shawn next demanded that the team bind all of Napster’s servers together, making a more complete system that could stand up to whatever Frankel had in mind. “We all freaked out,” Ritter said. By then, there had been a long-running debate inside Napster about whether to link the servers and how to do it. One of the existing system’s weaknesses was that everyone who logged on to search for a song was sent to just one server, which in turn referred the user to others who were relying on the same machine. When the number of servers grew to fifty, say, that meant each user was only exposed to the one-fiftieth of all the songs available on Napster at that moment. So many people were on each server that the songs being sought still came up better than 95 percent of the time. But linking them all together could make the system many times more powerful than it was.

There were a couple of arguments against linking. One of them was voiced by Napster’s legal team. The lawyers opposed linking for the same reason they opposed many other technical improvements at Napster: The step would make the company seem even more of a threat to the record industry, which could run to the judge already weighing the case. And it would offer another example of how involved the company was in directing people to songs. The more hands-off Napster was, the better chance it had when it argued that it was just like a telephone company or other automated service that couldn’t be responsible for the content it carried. Those concerns were likely on technology vice president Eddie Kessler’s mind when he sat for a sworn interview with the record-industry lawyers more than a month after Shawn started working on linking. Asked whether a plan for systemwide music searches was in the works, Kessler replied: “There hasn’t been any discussion of plans to have the server that users connect to search across the names of MP3 files other than the ones that user is connected to.” Kessler explained in a later interview that his denial had been based on semantics—“We didn’t have a plan to do it,” he said. The other case against linking, voiced often by Ritter, was technical. It was a serious challenge to tie the system together, and the whole thing could crash if it wasn’t done right. The biggest hurdle for the coders was

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