i-sako.com

I couldn’t help but notice an disturbing element in a recent news story about Ernie Ball, “the world’s leading maker of premium guitar strings endorsed by generations of artists ranging from the likes of Eric Clapton to the dudes from Metallica.” The story is a pretty typical former-MS-junkie-sees-the-light kind of article, as you can see in the following excerpt:

Rockin’ on without Microsoft

[S]ince jettisoning all of Microsoft products three years ago, Ernie Ball has also gained notoriety as a company that dumped most of its proprietary software—and still lived to tell the tale.

The story tells us that the Business Software Alliance found a few dozen copies of unlicensed software on the hard drives (but not necessarily in use) of a few Ernie Ball hand-me-down computers. For the sin of not erasing the hard drives on these old computers, the company was forced to pay $65,000 in fines, plus $35,000 in legal fees.

The outrage, for me at least, was later in the interview:

Did you want to settle?


Never, never. That’s the difference between the way an employee and an owner thinks. They attacked my family’s name and came into my community and made us look bad. There was never an instance of me wanting to give in. I would have loved to have fought it. But when (the BSA) went to Congress to get their powers, part of what they got is that I automatically have to pay their legal fees from day one. That’s why nobody’s ever challenged them—they can’t afford it. My attorney said it was going to cost our side a quarter million dollars to fight them, and since you’re paying their side, too, figure at least half a million. It’s not worth it. You pay the fine and get on with your business.

Since when does a defendant have to pay the legal costs of the prosecution? This strikes me as a corporate terror tactic: Make the little guy fear the costs of litigation so much that he will automatically cave in on the fines, whether he wants to or not.

In any other business, that would be customer abuse, but with Microsoft it is considered “protecting intellectual property rights.” No wonder the guy switched to open source software! Allow me to echo the article’s conclusion: “Thank you, Microsoft.”