Art & Creativity Quote by David Boies

Boies is doing what elite litigators do best: turning a cultural panic into a narrow question of doctrine, then answering it with a clean, courtroom-grade “No.” The line’s punch isn’t in the legal nuance but in the framing. He begins by stripping Napster of direct guilt - “only alleged liability” - which quietly recasts the company as an accessory to someone else’s acts, not the prime mover. Then he pivots to the real wager: if the users’ behavior isn’t infringement, the whole case against the platform collapses.

The subtext is political as much as legal. “Noncommercial sharing” is a strategic phrase, designed to smuggle in a moral distinction: kids trading MP3s aren’t black-market profiteers; they’re fans. Boies is betting that courts, and the public watching them, might treat the absence of cash as the absence of harm. He’s also implicitly drafting Napster into the American tradition of “new tech versus old gatekeepers,” where the villain is rarely the novelty and often the incumbent industry’s inability to adapt.

Context matters: this is the moment when record labels tried to equate peer-to-peer copying with theft, and Napster tried to equate it with home taping and fair use. Boies’ categorical “No” performs confidence, even provocation. It’s less a neutral legal conclusion than a rhetorical stake in the ground, aimed at shaping how a judge, and a generation, would narrate the internet’s first mass copyright war.