Your comment puzzles me - as others have repeated, what.cd was a fantastic archive of music that no current museum or library has come close to achieving. This community performed preservation and organization of art and culture (and many rare works) on a huge scale. How can you perform the mental gymnastics to call that a "gleeful disregard of common decency"? If anything, the destruction of that effort is what is so "indecent".

It is obviously unfortunate that the collection was illegal, but this seems clearly to be a situation where copyright law has run counter to the interests of civilization as a whole. Preservation should always trump licensing - licenses will expire, music will be passed from generation to generation.