Suing your customers is bad

G. Richard Shell at Wharton writes that suing your customers doesn’t work, and there’s a precedent to prove it. The article draws a comparison between the RIAA’s current strategy of suing its customers and a similar strategy used 100 years ago against people who bought Ford cars. It would seem like you could apply this to the SCO stuff, too, except for the fact that SCO doesn’t have customers and are trying to sue people into becoming customers.

As Henry Ford once summed it up, lawsuits against new technologies provide “opportunities for little minds … to usurp the gains of genuine inventors … and under the smug protest of righteousness, work a hold-up game in the most approved fashion.”