In 2000, Metallica noticed that a demo of their song "I Disappear" was getting played on the radio despite the Mission: Impossible II soundtrack not being out yet. Metallica discovered the song was leaked onto a new site called Napster and promptly filed a lawsuit in the U.S. District Court, Central District of California against the company.
On July 11, 2000 Metallica drummer Lars Ulrich testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee to accuse Napster of copyright infringement. The band was seeking a minimum of $10 million in damages from the site, provided a list of a list of almost 350,000 Napster users that allegedly downloaded the song, demanded their music be taken off the site, and that any user who downloaded their music be banned.
Ultimately Metallica and Napster settled in 2001 due to Napster potentially being bought, though the sale fell through thanks to a ruling against them, and in 2002 Napster filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy.
Metallica's decision to sue Napster wasn't very popular at the time, but public perception has shifted over the years in their favor. Corey Taylor has said that Lars Ulrich was "right on so many fucking levels" in his decision to sue Napster, while Mastodon drummer Brann Dailor has stated "[Lars] was trying to protect the little guy that's gonna be coming up." Even Ulrich himself has stated that artists who didn't fight against Napster at the time were "pussies," and has also assured fans that the lawsuit wasn't about the money at all.
Now Metallica's own lawyer Peter Paterno has spoken up about the lawsuit. In an interview with Variety, Paterno said the lawsuit was needed to "set the ground rules for what music is worth" and that fans stealing a band's music aren't even fans to begin with.
"[Napster] were basically thieves! It's not a popular opinion. The popular opinion now is a sort of revisionist history that we shouldn't have sued Napster, we should have worked something out with them — well, no, there was nothing to work out with them. 'You could have made a deal.' What was the deal? People were getting music for free. It was really necessary in order to set the ground rules for what music is worth.
"Those fans aren't fans — fans pay for music and appreciate its value. It's like Dre said when we told him about Napster,' he said, 'I work 24/7 in the lab and these guys just steal it? Screw them.'"
Paterno later touched on the fact that it took the music industry over a decade after that lawsuit to really nail down streaming, and that the lawsuit establishes some ground rules for distributing music and paying artists.
"I don't know if you remember, but they did try. They tried to develop this thing called Press Play, but record companies don't do technology, they needed a technology company to figure it out. So I think was on some level inevitable that it went the way it did. And like I said, I think the key to all the lawsuits was to at least establish some ground rules about what you have to do in order to distribute music and have creators get paid for what they do."
