All the world's a bootleg

摘要

Kurt Cobain and William Shakespeare are rarely mentioned in the same breath, but the Bard of Avon's name forced itself into my brain when I was downloading some Nirvana for a 12-year-old I know. It happened early this year, when a friend came for dinner, his daughter in tow. I was telling them about Napster—this was before the music-sharing site appeared on the cover of Newsweek, when a few people on the planet still hadn't heard of it. Suddenly my friend's daughter, who had been silently absorbed in her Discman, noticed our existence. "You mean," she said, "you can download any song you want?"