public ridicule

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...