Obituaries

Napster Let Anyone Download Any Song for Free. Metallica Personally Ended That.

For about two years, every song ever recorded was free, instant, and one search bar away. Napster launched on June 1, 1999, built by an 18-year-old college freshman who thought sharing MP3s should be as easy as saving a file, and by early 2000 it had roughly 80 million users doing exactly that. The music industry did not find this charming. It took a federal appeals court and a very angry drummer to shut it off.

An 18-Year-Old Solved Piracy's UX Problem

Shawn Fanning built Napster with Sean Parker while he was supposed to be attending Northeastern University, and the pitch was almost insultingly simple: a searchable index of everyone else's MP3 folder, connected peer-to-peer, no server storing the actual files. It wasn't the first way to pirate music, but it was the first way that didn't require knowing what an FTP server was. Usage went from a dorm-room project to tens of millions of people in under a year, which is roughly the speed at which a business model becomes a legal liability.

A rack of CDs, the format Napster made briefly optional. Photo: Arbitrarily0, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0.

The Labels Sued. So Did Metallica, Personally.

The major labels' case, A&M Records, Inc. v. Napster, Inc., reached the Ninth Circuit, which ruled on February 12, 2001 that Napster was liable for contributory and vicarious copyright infringement, upholding an injunction from the year before. But the more memorable plaintiff was Metallica, whose drummer Lars Ulrich filed a separate suit in March 2000 seeking upward of $10 million and personally delivered a list of roughly 335,000 Napster usernames the band wanted banned for trading their songs. Napster banned them. Ulrich's stated grievance was almost quaint by internet standards: nobody had asked the band's permission before turning their catalog into a public utility.

Free, Then Gone, Then a Subscription

Unable to comply with a court-ordered filtering system fast enough to keep operating, Napster shut its network down in July 2001 and filed for bankruptcy the following year. Metallica and producer Dr. Dre settled with the company that same July, on the condition that Napster keep blocking unlicensed tracks — with an understanding that some of their music might return once Napster became a paying, licensed service. The free version lasted about two years. The idea it proved — that people would rather stream music than own it — outlived the company by roughly two decades and now pays for itself, monthly, forever.

Filed from public reporting:

Apeel's Grape Seed Coating Once Kept Six in Ten American Supermarket Avocados From Spoiling. Then the Internet Found the Safety Data Sheet for a British Degreaser Also Called Apeel.

Apeel Sciences began in 2012 with a $100,000 grant from the Gates Foundation, awarded to a materials scientist named James Rogers to reduce the amount of food that rots between the farm and the plate in countries without reliable refrigeration. A second grant of about $1 million followed in

A Texas Power Company Charged $9.99 a Month to Let Customers Pay Exactly What the Wholesale Market Paid. In February 2021 the Market Paid $9,000 a Megawatt-Hour, and Griddy Drafted It Straight From Their Accounts.

Griddy Energy, a small Houston company that launched in 2017, sold Texans a simple idea. Most households in the state's deregulated electricity market pay a retailer a fixed rate, and the retailer carries the risk that wholesale power will cost more than it charged. Griddy removed the retailer&

Australia Paid Up to $1,600 a Home in 2009 to Insulate a Million Ceilings in a Year, Using Installers Who Signed Up Online. Its First Industry Meeting Heard New Zealand Had Tried This and Three People Electrocuted Themselves.

On 3 February 2009 Kevin Rudd announced the Energy Efficient Homes Package, part of a $42 billion stimulus plan meant to carry Australia through the global recession. Its centrepiece, the Home Insulation Program, offered free ceiling insulation worth up to $1,600 a home, with a target of 2.2

Subway Told Australian Customers Its Footlong Was a Trademark Name, Not a Measurement of Length. The US Trademark Board Ruled It Was a Measurement of Length and Refused Subway the Trademark.

In January 2013 Matt Corby, a teenager in Perth, bought a Subway Footlong and, as the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit would later put it, "for reasons unknown, decided to measure it." It was 11 inches long. He photographed it next to a tape