Thanks for the “Smear Campaign” article. I bet it emboldens many corporations.

I suspect that Gates, et. al., do that kind of stuff all the time. As a Burst.com investor, I may be just being hopeful in these two possible examples, but I also suspect that Mr. Gates mentioned to his Bridge Buddy Buffett, now economic advisor to your Governor, that a great revenue stream for the California government would be to tax punitive damages (at 75%!), which the Governor did suggest publicly at least once (my idea being that it would scare Burst, or their contingency-based lawyers, into settling and keeping the case out of court and off the record).

I further suspect the same perps are mentioning similar ideas to major-supplier Dow Jones. Barron’s July 5, 2004 issue included an article touting the benefits of federally taxing punitive damages (at 80%!). Dow Jones’ editors have long (always?) been at least somewhat hostile to antitrust laws and outrageous jury awards (me too, actually, but in Microsoft’s case I have to take exception — I bet if the WSJ editors had a better grasp of tech than what they get from Walt Mossberg, they would be a little less Microsoft boostery — maybe you should apply for another moonlighting job? Then again, they may be afraid of the potential hit to the DJIA), but the timing still strikes me as suspiciously similar to the patterns you mentioned. (That is an awful sentence — sorry, I tried to make it better; I think it ended up worse.)

Thanks again,
Tom Guerin