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takeover bid. AOL's concern was how to avoid becoming liable for a judgment itself. Rosen told Sacks that she would be willing to give AOL a break only if it bought Napster and immediately shut the service down. But even in that case, Rosen wouldn't give up the right to go after the previous Napster management, including Hummer Winblad. Without the guarantee of immunity for itself, Hummer Winblad lost interest in the sale, Rosen said. AOL's Sacks said his company coveted Napster's massive user base but would have passed on a deal even if it had stayed on the table. "We never supported the idea that copyrights should be infringed or that music should be free," Sacks said. "We always knew the transition from stolen music to purchased music would be challenging. We quickly decided Napster had no future."

Inside Napster, where the AOL talks and other sale attempts were well-kept secrets, the big news not coming from Patel's courtroom was Barry's hiring of Napster's first chief operating officer, Milton Olin. Yet another lawyer, Olin had been senior vice president of business and legal affairs at A&M Records, one of the plaintiffs in the Napster case. Olin left the record business after his company was acquired by Universal, joining an Internet start-up that offered previews of music and movies. Some at Napster speculated that his chief credential, beside his onetime membership on the RIAA's legal committee, was his old friendship with Barry. Buttressing Napster's argument that it would be impossible to sort out which users were offering infringing content and which weren't, Olin testified in a deposition that even inside the record business, it was often unclear who owned what. But Olin didn't make an impressive witness. Asked if he had ever in his career tried to determine who owned a copyright to a work, he said that he had not. Asked if at A&M it had ever been necessary to find out who had the rights to a music composition, he said he didn't know.

Movie-industry spokesman Jack Valenti may have had a dramatic impact on Napster's evolution without realizing it. As part of a package of affidavits submitted with the labels' motion for a preliminary injunction, Valenti had written in June that a multiple-industry group he chaired called the Copyright Assembly was deeply worried about where Napster-like technology was headed next. "If the courts allow Napster and services like it to continue to facilitate massive copyright infringement, there is a