Metallica v. Napster, Inc.

Metallica v. Napster, Inc.
Court	United States District Court for the Northern District of California
Full case name	Metallica v. Napster, Inc.
Court membership
Judge(s) sitting	Marilyn Hall Patel

Metallica, et al. v. Napster, Inc. was a 2000 U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California case that focused on copyright infringement, racketeering, and unlawful use of digital audio interface devices. Metallica vs. Napster, Inc. was the first case that involved an artist suing a peer-to-peer file sharing ("P2P") software company.

Metallica is a heavy metal band from San Francisco, California that was formed in 1981. Napster was a pioneering peer-to-peer file sharing Internet service, founded by Shawn Fanning, that emphasized sharing digitally encoded music as MP3 audio files. On April 13, 2000, Metallica filed a lawsuit against the file sharing company Napster. Metallica alleged that Napster was guilty of copyright infringement and racketeering, as defined by the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act. The lawsuit was filed in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California. This case was filed soon after another case was filed against Napster, the A&M Records, Inc. v. Napster, Inc., which included 18 large record companies.Metallica v. Napster, Inc. was the first highly publicized instance of an artist suing a P2P software company, and encouraged several other high-profile artists to sue Napster.

On July 11, 2000 Lars Ulrich read testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee accusing Napster of copyright infringement. In the testimony it is explained that in 2000, Metallica discovered that a demo of the song "I Disappear", which was set to be released with the Mission: Impossible II soundtrack, was being played on the radio. Metallica was able to trace the source of the leak back to a file on Napster's peer-to-peer file-sharing network. It was also discovered that the band's entire catalogue was available for free download. Metallica argued that Napster was enabling users to exchange copyrighted MP3 files. Metallica sought a minimum of $10 million in damages, at a rate of $100,000 per song that was illegally downloaded. Metallica hired NetPD, an online consulting firm, to monitor the Napster service. NetPD produced a list of 335,435 Napster users who were allegedly sharing the band's songs online in violation of copyright laws. The 60,000 page list was delivered to Napster's office. Metallica demanded that all of their songs be banned from file sharing, and that the users responsible for sharing their music also be banned from the service. This led to over 300,000 users being banned from Napster, although software was released that simply altered the windows registry and allowed users to rejoin the service under a different screen name. The suit also named several universities to be held accountable for allowing students to illegally download music on their networks. These universities included University of Southern California, Yale University, and Indiana University.

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