This WashPost story tells about efforts to shut down Kazaa in various countries. Kazaa is an internet search tools that is often used to share music, videos, pictures, and books. It upsets the business models of the big entertainment companies, and they are suing. But the principals are located in Netherlands, Estonia, Australia, and Vanatu. The entertainment companies might wish that they had cut a deal with Napster, because Napster operated on central servers in the US and could be monitored. Kazaa does not use a central server. Also, most of the Kazaa users have actually switched to an ad-free ripoff called Kazaa-Lite, and no one knows who is responsible for that, except that he goes by the Russian name Yuri.

Here are my reasons for thinking that Napster-like programs are a good thing.