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THE HUNGRY PROGRAMMERS

Max Vision found that life in Hungry Manor was good. Surrounded by rolling meadows on all sides, the house boasted two wings, four bedrooms, a maid’s quarters, a full dining room, a livestock pen, and a brick pizza oven and indoor barbecue in a vented room adjoining the vast, sunlit kitchen. The Hungries had turned the library into a computer lab and server room, packing in a slew of custom-built gaming PCs for recreation. They ran networking cable into every room and energized it with a high-speed Internet link that necessitated the partial shutdown of the 92 freeway as the phone company trenched a new cable run alongside the road. A vintage phone system linked the west wing to the east. As a finishing touch, one of the Hungry Programmers had brought in a hot tub and set it up on the grounds, under the stars.

Max couldn’t have asked for a better launchpad for his new life. One of the resident Hungries got him a job as a system administrator at MPath Interactive, a computer gaming start-up in Silicon Valley that was flush with venture capital. He threw himself into the job. Defying the stereotype of a computer nerd, he drew his greatest satisfaction from his support duties. He liked helping people.

But it wasn’t long before Max’s antics in Seattle caught up with him. One morning, a process server showed up at his cubicle to hand him a $300,000 lawsuit filed by the Software Publishers Association—an industry group that had decided to use his piracy bust to send a message. “This action is a warning to Internet users who believe they can infringe software copyrights without fear of exposure or penalty,” the association proclaimed in a press release.

As the first lawsuit of its kind, the case earned Max Butler a brief write-up in Wired magazine and a mention in a congressional hearing on Internet piracy. Max Vision, though, emerged largely unscathed—few in his new life made the connection to the man named in the high-profile lawsuit.