Wayne, I'd like to have been on that one, or the recent case against Research in Motion (RIM), the maker of Blackberries. They got nailed pretty bad too. There was a (stayed) injunction against the use or sale of Blackberries - both houses of Congress even took the rather extraordinary step of sending letters to the judge asking him to stay that injunction so they could continue to get their E-mails. Any way, RIM wound up coughing up some MAJOR money to the owner of the patent.
All of this, though, doesn't negate the fact that we're small-time compared to infringers like RIM and Sony. I certainly am NOT an advocate for willful infringement of any intellectual property right, be it patents (inventions and certain product designs), trademarks (logos, slogans, and certain product configurations), or copyrights (music, movies, manuscripts), but from a practical perspective, if one of us were to accidentally infringe, we'll most likely get a nasty letter telling us to stop, and maybe asking us to pay some damages (will have to be pretty nominal, given the low volume at which most of us produce our work). If, on the other hand, you are about to start the next Cross, Waterman, Mont Blanc, or other major distributor, that's another story! Either way, the courts have said that once someone knows about your infringement, they pretty much HAVE to write the nasty letter and follow through with some kind of settlement, otherwise their rights get diluted, and in most cases they've invested too much in securing their rights in the first place to allow that to happen, even on the small-time scale that most of us fall under.
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