Kazaa has decided to join Pirate Bay in becoming a legal peer to peer service. This raises interesting questions for moralistic pedants like me.

The full details of the story are here but that's not what I want to discuss. I'm more interested in what sort of message it sends out when people start off a business that's completely illegal by any amount of reckoning and are then effectively rewarded.

Actually 'rewarded' might be putting it a bit strongly. The companies are wound up, declared bankrupt and the owners held up to public ridicule. It's just that so many of them seem to come back as legitimate businesses - Napster being the first, or at least the first since all those DJs on Radio Caroline became big stars (British reference, sorry).

It was Charles Dickens who once said "The Law Is A Ass", becoming one of the most misquoted phrases in literature in the process. But if the law is going to declare things illegal which then become thriving businesses within years and on the side of the establishment, it's never been truer.