Yes, she was ordered to pay royalties. However, shortly afterward, the company sent her flowers, and issued a formal apology (ie, they realized they went *way* too far).

and I quote the article...
"In a note attached to a large bouquet of flowers they said: "We're very sorry we made a big mistake. We hear you have a lovely singing voice and we wish you good luck." "

There are no dumb questions.

He's here asking for advice, so give it to him. Even though most of the people who read/post this board are heavily involved with IT, and it might be a common sense answer, the fact is that to this person it isn't as simple a solution.

In many cases, people have sensitive information that they are handling on their servers, and whether or not to trust the IT staff is a valid question. (not all geeks are trustworthy). Also, in many cases, (especially with startups) they dont have the resources to hire on-site IT staff, so they have to outsource it. It introduces a dilemma that many will have to deal with.

-T

I'm seeing a lot of people complaining about VHDL and praising verilog, but I've used both and I'd say that the difficulties encountered with one will be seen with both. A lot of these complaints are just people who did some programming in VHDL and hated it. Using an HDL is not like using a normal programming language, and getting over that hurdle is what will be difficult for most people.

As far as what to teach in the class, identify what hardware you are going to use first, and then look at the tutorials supplied by the company supplying the boards. Most companies (Xilinx, Altera, to name a few) have tutorials they supply to use on their boards, that you can use as a first-step in designing coursework. I would make the language decision after checking what is supplied by the company.

-T

Filing fees, while costing money, are nowhere near the same cost as the hourly pay for most attorneys. I'd expect that even if the case continued for years, the expenses could never go above a few thousand a year. (which would still be quite a lot for expenses)

As far as drawing a lawsuit into eternity, that isn't possible. (eventually the justice presiding will catch on/snap). However, it is standard to play games to delay the court appearances to later times, and file many additional documents in the interim that need responses. As reading and responding to every filing costs time and money, it isn't very difficult to force attorney fees into the 50k-100k range (In high profile cases like this one, I'd expect much, much more). In most cases, people can't handle an expense like a lawyer for more than a very short term (even less than the 2 years you quoted), and the lawyer either stops getting paid regularly and pushes for settlement, or the client gets tired of paying, and drops the case. If you want a citation, go buy an account on loislaw and look for any suits that were dropped after extensive litigation, yet without resolution. Usually attorney fees were the cause (although it isn't officially stated, since it was just dropped).

Well, the advantage of a free lawyer in this case is that the record company can't just drag on proceedings to rack up expenses until she drops out. (A viable tactic in many lawsuits)

However, I'm worried about the lack of preparation time that the new lawyer has. He has to familiarize himself with all of the previous casework, as well as come up with a defensible position. (All in his free time too...)

I guess we'll see how it turns out pretty quickly.