Quote:
Originally Posted by celandina
Lawyer in Canada will charge CDN $ 400 - 700/hour. To bring and litigate a case is a minimum 100 hours PLUS filing fees and office items. So you are looking at a minimum of 50 K CDN $$ to get anywhere. And I did say minimum.  |
Yep. And that's the practical reality of "getting justice".
I wrote a popular mainstream industry vertical market software package back in the late eighties. Shortly afterwards, the publisher then created a derivative work using the lion's share of my data structures and code (essentially, he just gave the package a mouse-interface) and then he rationalized, contrary to copyright law and our royalties agreement, I was not entitled to royalties for version 1.001 of my work.
Years later, when I could afford, or though I could, I contacted an IP lawyer, who asked for $700 per hour with $3,000 retainer, just for me to get into his office.
So, litigating legitimate claims, is generally not worthwhile unless the claim is large enough.
Large corporations do however respond to risk of credible bad press. But they have the power of counter-suit, even though they have to pay extra for stationery, because it takes a quarter page to list their senior partners on the letterhead.