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larger cause of cyberfreedom. "We agonized over it, but they were doomed," an EFF staffer said.

Privately, Barlow blamed Napster for much of its predicament. "They blew it by not being Napster.org," he said, referring to the domain-name suffix generally reserved for nonprofit organizations. "There was no possible business model." But because Barlow worried that the case would set a horrible precedent, he filed a supportive affidavit with the court. So did Lessig, a Stanford law professor known for assisting a Washington court in the Microsoft case and for writing the book Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace, which explained how Internet protocols were a series of choices that would shape society. The book argued that the engineers who were making collective decisions about the Internet had better choose wisely if they were to avoid provoking the government into imposing harsh restrictions on cyberspace. Lessig felt that even when technologists went astray, as they might have with Napster, courts should not be in the business of extinguishing revolutionary developments.

In a long essay that was more legal advice to Judge Patel than expert testimony, and was therefore deemed inadmissible, Lessig said that the early architecture of the Internet was both a serious threat to copyright protection and an unprecedented boon to free speech. And he said that people on both sides of the argument had overlooked work in progress that could give copyright holders more protection than they had ever enjoyed. New technologies were making it possible to track and control what recipients did with digital works. In the interim, before those new technologies took hold, Lessig said, courts should proceed with extreme caution before killing new systems like Napster.

Even if massive copyright violations had occurred, Napster dramatically improved on previous search engines, which couldn't keep up as more Web pages changed dynamically. "It would be a mistake," Lessig wrote, "to ban a technology based on its initial use, even if significant violations of copyright were enabled. If that had been the test, then many of the early Internet technologies would have been banned. Likewise would the VCR have been banned, and possibly even the Xerox machine." Instead of trying to crop a new technology to fit a preexisting business model like that of the record industry, Lessig wrote, "it has been the prac-