Microsoft accused me of copyright violation and piracy. Did they know I wasn’t guilty? They certainly knew they had no evidence I had done anything wrong.
Probably they are just disorganized and stupid like every other organization. Some 15 people just didn’t get their act together and I got accused. It took a year to straighten out the mess, and cost Microsoft big bucks for Perkins Coie lawyers, air fair and lots of incidentals.
Somebody in Torrington complained to Microsoft about me. I had been in business for 15 years, have 5000 customers, and, according to Microsoft they had received three complaints. But this one made them send me a form letter.
Patricia Urban got a list from some list-keeper at Microsoft that said I had received the form letter. That was her green light to try to trap me into selling her some pirated Microsoft software. I don’t know if she thought up the plan by herself, or if it developed over time, but she asked me to sell her Microsoft products that Microsoft no longer sold. I sold her I the products she wanted from eBay which Microsoft’s Sue Ventura assures us was pirated.
Urban gets pirated software from me and tells probably Sharon Cates that I sold pirated software and that is all she needs to know. She calls Perkins Coie who puts Katherine Dugdale on the case to prosecute this pirate you are reading right here right now.
Who is morally reprehensible? Certainly Patricia Urban, and Sharon Cates, and Katherine Dugdale. None of them bothered to consider what they were doing. The law allows them to prosecute people for $150,000 for downloading a single pirated song, but in this case they just assumed I was scum because Patricia Urban bought a computer from me.
I am absolutely certain Cates had no idea what was going on. Microsoft was flying blind. Dugdale might have known, might have done her job, might have read the case notes and seen that there was no evidence against me. She might have continued the case because it is all just billable hours to her and her company, and who know? They might just find something bad about me in the Discovery process.
At some point she wanted out. She got a subservient young John K. Roche to take her place, to take the blame for her as things started going badly for Microsoft. And he saw the problems as well, and somehow got out of coming to the final settlement conference. He sent me some friendly email asking me for a confidentiality agreement that just said I would not say anything bad about Microsoft. In the settlement conference Judge Martinez said there is a fine line between not saying anything bad and not saying the truth. But in any case our settlement agreement does not keep me from saying anything bad about Microsoft, which is in the final analysis a bad company.
We should also say something about the Connecticut firm which filed the charges against me in Federal Court for Perkins-Coie. That is the Connecticut flunky firm Roche-Pia LLC. They had no hand in this whatsoever. They only wanted the billable hours, and the both of them knew they would get money for very little work and no one knew or cared whether or not I was a pirate. It did not matter. They just wanted the money.
You might ask how I know who is a flunky, who is important, and how I knew. John K. Roche is the first to walk up to me and say how lucky I was that I have this Microsoft representative and not another, because the other is much harder. And Gerald Pia did the same thing at the second settlement conference. Further, Pia was actually carrying the umbrellas of the Microsoft delegation.
So the only person to come out of this mess with integrity was me. Dugdale hoped I would be scum but couldn’t prove it, and was just trying to make money for her firm. Roche – Pia were both just money grubbers, didn’t know or care about anything. They just had to sign their names, spring for postage and show up for court.
Sharon Cates was the only Microsoft employee involved, and the big wig that came to court. I wish I had his name. I don’t know even if it was the same man who came both times. Somehow I will find his name, but it was not in any court documents. Both of those who actually worked for Microsoft acted shamefully. They did not know or care about the details, they just wanted money from me. Cates said horrible things about me that were not true. The guy in court just didn’t know what was going on.
