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a bit after he graduated from Columbia Law School and moved west, taking a job in 1970 with the L.A. firm of Mitchell Silberberg & Knupp. Soon after that move, Frackman paired with partner Howard Smith, an early force in filing record-company lawsuits against unauthorized duplicators. There weren’t too many of those, since the duplicating required massive investment. So Smith led the way upstream, going after retailers that knowingly sold pirated goods and were easier to collect damages from. In the years after that part of the firm’s practice began, Mitchell Silberberg developed a close relationship with the record dons, and one of its partners served as the Recording Industry Association of America’s acting head of litigation during the Napster case. After Smith retired, Frackman became the industry’s go-to man.

While the RIAA developed a reputation as a bully among Napster aficionados, the group rarely filed suit. When Frackman took the call from the RIAA to file against Napster, it didn’t take long for him to conclude that he had a winner. “I looked at it as a copyright case, not a technology case. I thought it was very good,” Frackman said. More than anything, the facts reminded him of one of his greatest triumphs, when in 1996 he had argued successfully before the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals that a flea market could be held responsible for letting vendors sell pirated recordings. After Napster lost its bid for summary judgment, Frackman drafted more associates to help him as the timetable accelerated. They would have just a few weeks to plow through scores of boxes of Napster documents and change the momentum of the case.

A week after she left Napster, at the end of May 2000, Eileen Richardson went in for the sworn interview known as a deposition. She had never been through the grueling process before, and the Napster lawyers told her the cardinal rule: Say as little as possible. But as CEO, she had already said too much. Frackman put an article in front of her. “I’ll read this to you and actually give you a copy if you want,” he said, then recounted her words: “Maybe I know about this band just in our local town, and you know about them too. I can share that with you directly. It’s not about known artists like Madonna.” Richardson acknowledged that she had said something to that effect. Frackman then presented her with a printout of a directory from her laptop computer. “There are, it seems to me, one, two, three, four, five Madonna MP3

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