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pushing the legal envelope. Shawn just didn’t think they’d get sued. Parker did, but he thought Napster had legal arguments that would be at least good enough to buy time until the industry opted to settle. “We understood where it was going to go. It was premeditated,” Parker said. The game plan made Grosfeld very uncomfortable. And as for making money ahead of a record-industry deal, the law stressed the dangers of profiting from the wrongful behavior of others. Finally, avoiding that pitfall by avoiding profit didn’t exactly strike Grosfeld as a solid business model. “If they profited, they were profiting from theft,” he said. “We live in America, and that’s punishable.”

John Fanning, also well aware of the legal hurdles, was doing his own research. He called Andrew Bridges, a partner at the top law firm in Silicon Valley, Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati. Bridges might have been the best single person to call. An expert in intellectual property and cyberspace with a law degree from Harvard, Bridges was defending Diamond Multimedia Systems Inc., the maker of the Rio portable MP3 player, which had been sued by the Recording Industry Association of America on copyright grounds. Bridges won that case, which extended the Sony VCR decision to new devices. But he told Fanning that he wasn’t interested in representing Napster. Instead, Bridges referred Fanning to a lawyer named Bruce Joseph. Joseph begged off as well, sending Fanning to Washington lawyer Seth Greenstein. Greenstein took Fanning’s call, and the two chatted. As Fanning described how the service worked, Greenstein said it sounded like search engine Lycos’s music service “on steroids.” Fanning put the phone down and passed the compliment on to Shawn. Both laughed. At last—someone who got it.

Greenstein had worked for a number of Internet music companies, including RealNetworks Inc. of Seattle, and in 1998 he had cofounded the Digital Media Association and testified before Congress. Greenstein said he would be willing to help develop a legal rationale for Napster. Since his firm also represented some record companies, however, he said he might not be available for any litigation to come. Parker soon went to visit Greenstein in his office at McDermott, Will & Emery. Parker had never been in a law office before, and he was cowed by the posh trappings