(Classic Rock) Kirk Hammett says that one of the biggest regrets of his career is that Metallica were all-but abandoned to fight Napster at the beginning of the digital music explosion.
The band launched the first-ever legal action against a peer-to-peer service in 2000, citing breach of copyright and racketeering, leading to Napster being shut down.
In the intervening years the matter has been reconsidered and the band are generally held to have been correct in their attitude - although their approach of delivering a list of 30,000 people who'd downloaded their material remains controversial.
They've argued on several occasions that their lawsuit wasn't about money, but about an artist's right to choose how and where their art can be accessed. That's a principle that's become central to arguments about digital distribution.
Hammett tells The Word Of Wheeler: "If there's anything thing I regret, I regret that no one else supported us during that Napster time. I don't even know if you can call it a regret. Maybe it's more of a disappointment. I was very disappointed that other musicians who saw our point, they supported us in ways that were less inconvenient to them.
"We stuck our necks out there. At the end of the day, I'd like to say what we were doing had some merit - some truth to it." Read more here.
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