Art & Creativity Quote by David Boies

Boies is doing what top trial lawyers do best: widening the frame until the stakes feel bigger than the plaintiff and scarier than the defendant. In 2000, “Napster” was already cultural shorthand for teenage rebellion, MP3s, and a music industry panicking in public. Boies’ move is to concede that obvious association - yes, you think “music” - and then pivot hard to what courts care about: precedent. He’s not selling a verdict; he’s selling a rule.

The line’s quiet power is its rebranding of the conflict. If this is “about music,” it sounds like an industry trying to protect a business model. If it’s “about the whole Internet,” it becomes a constitutional-scale argument about how innovation survives contact with legacy regulation. That’s strategic empathy: Boies invites judges, policymakers, and even tech-curious readers to see themselves as stakeholders, not just referees in a copyright spat.

There’s subtext in the word “struck,” too. It performs a kind of reluctant seriousness, as if the attorney isn’t simply hired muscle but a sober witness to history. That posture matters because the Napster litigation arrived at a hinge moment: the early web still felt like a frontier, and legal doctrine hadn’t caught up to network effects, intermediaries, and frictionless copying.

Boies is also inoculating against the easy moral narrative. Instead of arguing “piracy is wrong” or “sharing is freedom,” he signals the real contest: whether the Internet becomes a permissioned channel governed by incumbents, or an open platform where disruptive tools aren’t presumed guilty by association.