November 28, 2001
From the desk of Mindles H. Dreck:Microsoft settlement another bad precedent
Chester Finn writes about the three "dubious features" of the planned Microsoft class action settlement today (no link - on the site for subscribers only). The settlement involves Microsoft providing over a billion dollars of free software and reconditioned computers to schools
1) It "clothes that ignoble species known as the plaintiffs bar lawyer in the spiffy garb of socially conscious policy activists" by turning a class action into a school fundraiser, he means.
2) Schools are Apple's dominant market, and this is sure to give Windows products a natural toehold - in a sense it is "dumping"
3) Computers won't necessarily improve schools
I'm sympathetic to the second and third arguments. There's a lady across the street from me who turned down a job teaching in the Trenton schools. She said she wasn't energized to deal with the screwed-up school system there. Her example was that they were giving away iMacs to the students, but couldn't get the parents to come pick them up! School improvement will come from innovation in HOW they do things more than with how much resources they do the same things. And let's face it, the schools that get the free Windows stuff will become Windows users.
But one of the real issue in this settlement for me, above and beyond the "dressing up" of the plaintiffs bar, is the way it perpetuates the awful shakedown racket that our civil courts have become. Torts are intended to compensate VICTIMS. In the class action business, the awards (after expenses) are often very small per claimant, as they are in this case. So the claimants don't bother to do the paperwork to claim the award. By the way, guess where a lot of that unclaimed money goes? Into the coffers of Consumers Union/Consumer Reports. As I have said in other posts, people do what they are incentivized to do..including rolling over SUVs if it pays the bills.
This developed and profitable industrry of using legal action to redistribute money to someone other than the victim, for whatever purpose, is a complete bastardization of the Tort idea.
Posted by Mindles H. Dreck at November 28, 2001 10:12 PM | Technorati inbound links