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the most devoted Napster users found ways around it. One popular trick used pig Latin for the names of songs and bands. A more sophisticated tool, developed by onetime message-board moderator Wayne Chang and posted at Napsterhelp.com, used encryption to trick the Napster servers into steering users to MP3 files without ever gleaning the file names. “I just wanted to bring back what was once so great,” Chang said. The record industry complained about all of the holes, and Patel declared Napster’s early filtering efforts to be “disgraceful.” Napster’s lawyers promised the company would do better, and in April it bought a cutting-edge but still-imperfect system for identifying song files by the music they contained. Patel appointed a technical adviser to baby-sit the new effort and demanded frequent updates. The fans were miserable. On one personal website devoted to all things Napster, the host wrote: “Is anyone there besides me wincing at what’s beginning to look like the cruel and unusual death of Napster? It’s getting just too painful to watch.”

Napster was fast running out of alternatives. In June 2001, the company’s first step in further appeals, asking the full Ninth Circuit to revisit the decision of its panel, failed to muster a single judge’s vote in support. That scotched talk of a long-shot petition to the U.S. Supreme Court. Instead, Napster promised that its new subscription service would be available later that summer. Until then, it was stuck trying to make its new screening system something less than a complete disaster. Patel had given Napster until June 28 to perfect the system, and the in-house engineers clearly weren’t going to make it in time. Barry hired several consultants, including early Listen.com executive Richard Carey as chief engineer, and licensed still more outside technology in a frantic bid to get the new audio-fingerprinting system up and running by the deadline.

In addition to the legal pressure and the possibly insurmountable technical issues, Napster was wracked by near terror of its own upper management and by internal divisions. Some of the best engineers, led by Ali Aydar, had gotten themselves assigned to the far-more-pleasant task of developing the next generation of Napster, instead of the more-urgent but depressing task of working on the filter. And there were still true believers—“Shawn’s fans,” as Carey called them—who thought the com-