Napster, a program for sharing MP3 files, has transformed the way music files are shared over the Internet. In its heyday, anyone looking for free music just had to search Napster's database for the artists or songs they wanted and download them for free. Because of its operations, Napster was successfully sued for violation of copyright and has long since been forced to remove all copyrighted files from its database. In academia, there are already a number of similar sites that offer free scholarly journals. In this article, the author examines whether it would be possible for an academic equivalent to Napster that deals with written texts as opposed to music files to exist. He then discusses the fact that copyright does not seem to be a problem when it comes to e-print archiving, as authors are submitting pre-print versions of their work. The author discusses the consequences of this system for the way in which scholarly research is conceived, acquired, communicated, exchanged, practiced and understood. (Contains 37 notes.)