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material. That exemption, Napster said, meant only that it had to take down links to offending material after it was notified about the material—something Napster also said that it was impractical to do, since the links popped up and then disappeared again as users logged on and off. Unfortunately for that defense, the exemption didn't apply to companies that were “aware of facts or circumstances from which infringing activity is apparent.” As the industry lawyers put it, “The DMCA's safe harbors protect innocent infringers, not those like Napster, that deliberately build a business based almost exclusively on piracy.”

As soon as the industry filed its attack, it was obvious that the labels stood an excellent chance of winning. Ritter started reworking his résumé and wrote to his mother: “The end of Napster may be upon us.” Hank Barry knew that if he couldn't stop the injunction, almost everything else he wanted to try would be useless. Discouraged by the previous legal team's losses, Barry called the biggest gun he could think of, ace litigator David Boies.

Raised in rural Illinois, Boies had kept his midwestern twang through his years at Cravath, Swaine & Moore, representing the likes of IBM and CBS Inc., and seldom losing. After starting his own New York firm, Boies cemented his reputation for brilliance by deconstructing Microsoft and Bill Gates on behalf of the U.S. Justice Department. When Napster called, Boies was out of town. He had never heard of the company and wasn't inclined to take on new clients anyway. But his twin thirty-two-year-old sons took the phone call and lobbied their father hard to take the case. Boies was interested mainly because the case was on the cutting edge of the law. “The first thing that struck me was that this was an important case not only for the music industry but for the whole of the Internet,” he said. “Here you have a new technology, in terms of peer-to-peer sharing of information, and if that technology is going to work, you must allow people to have central indexes.” With an injunction hearing already scheduled for the following month, Boies threw staffers onto the case and soon discarded most of Napster's old and failing arguments.

While still maintaining that Napster should be protected by the