This is another point that’s widely misunderstood about the Napster story. The lawsuits and the media publicity that came with them helped create the Napster sensation. It was almost a textbook example of the Streisand Effect, the phenomenon (as Wikipedia describes it) whereby an attempt to hide, remove or censor a piece of information has the unintended consequence of publicizing the information more widely. Before the lawsuit, there were maybe 50,000 users on Napster; a month after the lawsuit, that number had tripled to 150,000.38 By the summer of 2000, there were more than 20 million.
