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pretty straightforward,” he recalled. And he hadn’t found Frackman intimidating. “Either they went easy on me, or it wasn’t too bad,” Shawn said. Music publishers’ lawyer Carey Ramos, who participated in the deposition, agreed that Shawn had acquitted himself admirably. Afterward, Ramos thought: “Here’s a nice kid who just stumbled into all this attention. He got surrounded by people who wanted to make a buck, all these handlers that wanted to make him into a poster boy.”

Parker was encouraged by Shawn’s mild experience, but he still had reason to be nervous. He had written most of the early strategy documents, while Shawn had been busy coding. And instead of Frackman, Parker drew an unknown quantity as his interrogator—Frackman’s partner George Borkowski, a brusque and pointed questioner with a gleam in his eye. Borkowski had been working until near midnight the previous evening, combing through the boxes of documents Napster had just turned over. Then he hit on what looked like one of the best pieces of evidence he had ever seen in a copyright case. And then he found another, just as good. They were nothing less than open admissions that the company was deliberately helping its users pull off the largest piracy job in history. In one e-mail from Parker to Fanning, Napster’s cofounder had stressed the importance of anonymity this way: “Users will understand that they are improving their experience by providing information about their tastes without linking that information to a name or address or other sensitive data that might endanger them (especially since they are exchanging pirated music).”

In the other damning document, Parker used the same poor word choice in laying out the essence of the Napster gamble: “Many of the strategies I mentioned above (harping CDs, recommendation engine, etc.) will put us in a much better bargaining position with the RIAA when they see that we are not just making pirated music available but also pushing demand.” Borkowski stopped reading. “It is the kind of thing you don’t see every day,” he recalled. He took the papers and walked down the hall to one of the attorneys for the music publishers who had joined in the lawsuit. “Boy,” he told lawyer Jeff Knowles, “this is going to be a fun deposition.” As he read the documents, Knowles’s eyes grew noticeably larger.

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