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In court, John Fanning tried to stop the sale to Roxio, and his lawyers argued in a filing that their client was the “reputed owner” of some of the assets at stake, including the unused Napster.net domain name and Napster’s cat-head logo. Two days before the final hearing, Fanning filed his own, more emphatic objection, one that no lawyer signed. In it, he said that he had never transferred the ownership of Napster.net or even Napster.com to the company when he incorporated Napster Inc. in 1999 and that he “never received any consideration from Napster in return for the purported assignment of his property interests in the intellectual property.” Fanning also maintained that he had never signed an asset-transfer agreement to secure Hummer Winblad’s investment the following year. Instead, he asserted, an older signature page had been substituted without his approval. “Mr. Fanning remains the rightful owner of the domain names,” he wrote. Since Napster’s trustee couldn’t prove the company owned the assets in question, Fanning argued, the court couldn’t very well sell them off.

At the November 27 hearing five days after Shawn turned twenty-two, Fanning didn’t appear in court to testify in support of his claims, instead sending in another new lawyer. An unimpressed Judge Walsh overruled Fanning’s objection and approved the sale to Roxio. Later that afternoon, the deal closed. The Napster technology went off to an uncertain future, and Napster the company belonged to history.

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