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By Root 344 0

Metallica MP3s was then personally hand-delivered by an indignant Lars to Napster’s San Mateo headquarters: thirteen boxes of over 60,000 pages of legal paperwork. At Metallica’s request, the users were banned from the site. A sophomore student at IU, Chad Paulson, and founder of the website Students Against University Censorship, was quoted as saying: ‘I can’t believe [Metallica] have to or would sue their fans. I am sure that nobody anticipated this. I think it is a big hypocrisy on their part, because Metallica allows fans to record their live concerts and freely distribute their recordings like Dave Matthews and Phish.’ Within days, however, both Yale and Indiana had blocked Napster use on campus. As a result, both universities were dropped from the Metallica lawsuit. USC also later followed suit.

The battle over the legitimacy of the site raged on, and in July pictures of Lars arriving in his limo to testify before the US Senate Judiciary Committee made the TV news across America. Eventually Federal Judge Marilyn Hall Patel would order Napster to place a filter on its own site within seventy-two hours or be shut down immediately. A settlement was also eventually reached between Metallica and Napster when the German media conglomerate Bertelsmann BMG looked into buying the rights to Napster for $94 million, with the site blocking users from file-sharing tracks by any artists that objected to the process. Presented publicly as a win/win situation for both sides, Metallica’s lawsuit effectively closed down Napster in its original form. Less than two years later the company would file for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection. By September 2002, when another judge blocked its sale to Bertelsmann under US bankruptcy law, Napster was obliged to liquidate its assets. These days Napster exists as an online provider of legal downloads for subscription fees to members. The real loser in the war with Napster was arguably Metallica, such was the permanent scar it left on the band’s public face. Metallica may have had all the legal rights in the Napster case but publicly it was the website that would occupy the moral high ground, becoming Robin Hood to the band’s nasty Sheriff of Nottingham. This was not just in the minds of the fans who had been using the site, but also in the majority of the music press in Britain and America, even with other artists, who publicly came out in favour of Napster. Fred Durst of nu-metal stars Limp Bizkit said pointedly, ‘The only people worried about [Napster] are really worried about their bank accounts.’ He then agreed for Limp Bizkit to participate in a free nationwide US tour to generate support for Napster. In a letter to the New York Times, rapper Chuck D said: ‘Unlike many of my fellow artists, I support the sharing of music files on the internet. I believe artists should welcome Napster. We should think of it as a new kind of radio-promotional tool.’

This last point was one shared by many fans who claimed they only used the file-sharing service to ‘preview’ tracks of albums they would then buy online or in-store. Critics, meanwhile, pointed out the hypocrisy of a band such as Metallica, who first came to prominence via the cassette-tape-trading scene of the pre-internet early 1980s, now complaining about their fans trading in the modern equivalent. Whatever one’s view of how readily copyrighted material should be made available over the internet, this last accusation was disingenuous at best. Making a cassette-tape recording of a record then mailing it out to a friend, who may then make a second- and third-generation recording of that tape is a laborious process, the quality of the recording diminishing slightly each time a copy is made. To suggest it might significantly reduce an artist’s ability to sell original copies of their recordings is spurious. The difference with Napster was that one fan putting one track online could result in millions of perfectly recorded copies being downloaded in a single day. The threat to an artist’s livelihood is obvious. As Scott Stapp, lead singer of Creed,