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grave risk that the public will begin to perceive and believe that they have a right to obtain copyrighted materials for free," Valenti wrote. "If Napster can encourage and facilitate the distribution of pirated sound recordings, then what's to stop it from doing the same to movies, software, books, magazines, newspapers, television, photographs, or video games?"

Actually, very little would stop it. Shawn had called for expanding Napster to other media months before, and now Napster was considering doing so. As things stood, Napster recognized only MP3 files. But the engineers had tweaked the system in tests to allow swapping of Microsoft Word text documents and Adobe Acrobat graphic files. If a new version of Napster was released with that capability, usage could have doubled, and an entire new front in the battle had been opened. Ritter, who ordinarily supported enhancing functions no matter the risk, in this instance disagreed. It wasn't because he didn't think people should be able to share whatever they wanted. It was just that he understood the lessons from aggressive search engines like Scour, which often turned up documents from computers whose owners didn't realize that the material could be seen by others. "I think these format types are a big mistake," Ritter wrote on June 26, weeks after Valenti's declaration. "Napster is hyped and misconstrued enough; the above types are excellent fuel to an already unmanageable fire." Barry killed the plan, probably influenced more by Valenti than by Ritter. As the former AltaVista executive Don Dodge explained it to Ritter three days later: "Hank decided yesterday that we would not release the non-music file types. . . . As with most decisions these days, it was a legal call."

Other legal calls kept Napster documents out of court and out of the public eye. Almost all corporate litigation includes minor but time-consuming and expensive disputes about who is entitled to take depositions from whom and which documents they get to see. When enough arguments pile up and can't be resolved through compromise, the judge gets stuck having to make rulings on such minutiae. A hearing on several of those flaps was held June 19 in what would be one of Napster attorney Laurence Pulgram's last turns in the leading role before Boies got up to speed. Most of the issues were of little consequence. But one of them, a request for Napster documents, was so clearly legitimate that Patel didn't understand why Napster was resisting. The documents, like most of those