"I like Napster because I can listen to cool music and get music I couldn't get through other channels and share it with other people. It's a fun thing to do," says Stanford senior David Weekly, a Napster fan who was recently drawn into a mini-controversy when he puzzled out the protocols that make Napster work and published the results online, to the dismay of Napster executives. He uses the service up to 10 hours a week to swap electronica and Mahler songs and staunchly defends the practice: "Sharing music is pretty core to what makes people people -- it's not an evil reflex to want to share music you love."

As a Napster user, you designate a folder on your hard drive, where you will store the MP3s you're willing to share with the world. Then, every time you turn on Napster, your computer temporarily becomes a server, allowing other Napster users to download the MP3 files in that folder. The minute you log on, Napster will send a list of the songs in your directory to its central servers; users can then search the master Napster list for individuals who have the song that they want to download. Napster doesn't store the music on its own servers, but simply matches up the IP addresses of the downloader and downloadee. There are no broken links, server glitches or unrelated results; the database of available songs is astoundingly deep.

"Napster was built on a frustration with unreliable, Web-based search engines like Scour.net and mp3.lycos.com and just the desire to share music," explains Fanning. "There was no good way to share musical content with people."

Napster, in contrast, works so well that it's already clogging the bandwidth of universities, where those first-adopter college kids live. Earlier this month Hofstra University in Hempstead, N.Y., asked its Internet service provider, Applied Theory, to try to limit the amount of Napster traffic going through its pipes. Apparently students were leaving Napster on all night long, downloading hundreds of songs and hogging all the bandwidth. Bob Riley, director of network services at Applied Theory, explains, "Napster isn't doing anything illegal, or anything that the Net wasn't designed to do. The problem is that it's one of those killer apps that people talk about, an invention that consumes resources and is too popular."

Fanning says that IRC, his old stomping grounds, was the program's biggest influence (though Napster also bears a striking resemblance to underground shareware programs like Hotline). Staying true to the old IRC adage of share-and-share-alike (as in don't download something unless you are going to upload something else), Napster's open structure means that there are no "lurkers." Finding one Napster user with similar tastes often leads to a treasure trove of new and interesting music you'll like; everyone who uses Napster, it is predetermined, is willing to share.

Despite the rapidly growing company built around it, Napster still feels much like an underground MP3 community. "Napster feels a little like the first days of MP3, when no one was trying to hide anything but was just saying this is really cool," explains Weekly. "It's sort of like those glory days -- here's all the music, we're not ashamed to share everything."

Of course, Napster is also rife with piracy. Napster staffers insist that the program was intended to be used by artists and fans. Fanning, a novice musician himself, says he envisioned indie bands making their MP3s available for download without having to go through intermediaries like MP3.com or Emusic. But the reality is that most people are using Napster to swap illegal MP3 files -- ripped (copied from CDs into MP3 format) copies of 'N Sync tracks, the latest Alanis Morissette tune, the new album from Korn. This does not make the RIAA happy, and as a result, the industry trade group is taking Napster, Fanning and his entourage to court.

Napster, of course, downplays the fact that most people use its service to swap illegal MP3s. Richardson focuses on the community and marketing potential for the product. "One opportunity for us is community, adding ICQ [instant messaging] features so that while you are downloading a song you can say to the guy, 'Gosh, I can't believe you have this!' People are so passionate about music, and it's inherently viral, it's a natural fit for this community stuff," she explains. "But also, since we know you as a user and can see what you are downloading, we can feed up to you, through collaborative filtering, a band you've never heard of that you have a 99 percent chance of loving." Record companies could use this to promote new bands, she says.

The recording industry isn't buying this. In December, not long after the beta release of the product, the RIAA filed suit alleging that Napster is operating as a haven for music piracy on the Internet. The RIAA was unwilling to comment for this story, but infuriated press releases and statements from the group's officers claim that Napster is promoting copyright infringement: "Napster is similar to a giant online pirate bazaar: Users log onto Napster servers and make their previously personal MP3 collections available for download by other Napster users who are logged on at the same time. Napster provides its users with all the facilities and means to engage in massive copyright infringement."

Napster's response is that the onus for honesty is on the users, not the network. According to Richardson, Napster is like an ISP, protected under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act: It isn't the company's fault that people use its service to exchange illegal files, just as it wouldn't be AOL's legal responsibility if terrorists used one of its private chat rooms to plan a bombing. And it's true that if Napster's users were innocently exchanging MP3 recordings of their own invention, the RIAA would probably pay no mind to Napster whatsoever. However, those college students would rather swap chart-toppers -- and it's easier for the RIAA to go after the network than tracking down the hundreds of thousands of individuals who are exchanging a pirated song here and there. Although they're doing that too.

According to Robin Gross, a staff attorney for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Napster may find a precedent in the Betamax decision -- a 1984 case in which the motion picture industry attempted to sue Sony, the makers of the first VCR, for enabling copyright infringement. The Supreme Court decided that technology can't be outlawed merely because some of its uses are for unlawful purposes. Adds Gross, "There are substantial non-infringing uses for this [Napster] technology -- this is a technology that allows people to share public domain works with each other, or there might be copyright holders who don't mind sharing their works."

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