by SHANE SINNOTT

In 2000, Metallica discovered a demo of theirs called “I Disappear” had leaked, and traced it to the just-then-becoming-known peer-to-peer network Napster. For those not old enough to remember, Napster was shockingly glorious at the time. Imagine being able to suddenly listen to anything you wanted, all this stuff you’d been hearing about, at the touch of a button—this in the days when you were carting armloads of blank CDs over to your friend Daryl’s house ’cause his dad had a CD burner.

With Napster, I discovered the Silver Jews, and that the Radiohead album Kid A sucked. It probably got me into more music than anything else except the now defunct oink.me.uk torrent site. What Metallica did, meanwhile, was hire a company to watch Napster and compile a list of supposed sharers of their songs, got these people banned, and then initiated a lawsuit against the company that eventually brought it down. Metallica was the first band to sue its fans, and so with that in mind, I offer to you “The Day That Never Comes” from their just released record, Death Magnetic, at tinyurl.com/4dnszr. It’s almost eight minutes long. I don’t like it.

Meanwhile, the seeds that Metallica planted continue to bear fruit. The folks behind the Oink site mentioned above (may its angelic soul rest peacefully in Internet heaven) are finally getting their day in court after the shutdown almost a year ago. A half-dozen members have been charged with copyright infringement, and the administrator, Alan Ellis, has been charged with conspiracy to defraud. Trent Reznor’s comments after the shutdown best address the “conspiracy to defraud” supposedly perpetrated by Oink. “I’ll admit I had an account there and frequented it quite often. At the end of the day, what made Oink a great place was that it was like the world’s greatest record store. Pretty much anything you could ever imagine, it was there, and it was there in the format you wanted. If Oink cost anything, I would certainly have paid, but there isn’t the equivalent of that in the retail space right now.”

Oh, and listen to this Walkmen song: tinyurl.com/4snbvg.