VIDEO: Lars Ulrich talks of Suing Napster with the Huffington Post...
"We weren't quite prepared for the sh-tstorm that we became engulfed in. It started out as a street fight ... There was a song we were working on for the 'Mission Impossible II' movie called 'I Disappear' that all of a sudden showed up on radio stations across the country ... it wasn't even mixed, it wasn't even finalized ... We were like, 'How did that happen?' I got a call from our office the next day : 'It traces back to something called Napster.' And we were like, 'Well, they f--ked with us, we'll f''k with them.'"
The drummer also iterates that his decision to take the file sharing network to court was not motivated by greed, but the idea of personal choice:
"We stood our ground and fought the fight. Obviously it was a difficult time. It's not easy being finger wagged at that level. Especially because the Napster people were really smart in that they made the whole fight about money and: 'Metallica are technologically inept and they don't want to give stuff away for free' and we were like, 'Hang on, it's not about money. It's about control. It's about whose choice should it be.' We were saying it should be our choice. I we wanna give our stuff away, we'll give our stuff away. That's a no brainer, but that should be our choice. The choice was taken away ... They made the 'it's about money' argument way louder and they were very smart."
Ulrich also believes that the band was "somewhat right" in doing what they did, even if it has come to define him in the public eye:
"13 years later, it was what it was. I'm proud of the fact that we stood up at the time and I think that history has proved that we were somewhat right. "It'll be in the first five sentences of my obituary, and I sort of accept that for better or worse."
What do you think. Has history proved Ulrich right? Or do you still feel that the band was wrong to take Napster to court?
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