Richard this is what various start up companies have done for years. Rip off other companies in order to get themselves off the ground. The thinking is they can get away with it long enough to get established and the owners make some serious cash. Since it takes years for these things to get discovered and then for the lawsuits to start, then more years due to court delays and continuances they're still ripping off stuff and still making money while all that is being litigated. When they finally lose in court and have to pay up, the lawsuits just become the cost of doing business because now the company is big enough to handle it. They simply ate the fines and moved on.

Iow, this was planned from the beginning and the strategy worked. It's a very cynical comment about some businesses but smart people know that no matter how much bad publicity gets generated from stuff like this it's still "inside baseball" and the general public has no clue so from their point of view, no harm, no foul.

Now they're legitimate, now they've cleaned up their act and everything is cool. The question is do you want to reward them for being snakes in the first place because it was totally willful, totally planned out. It was no accident. How do you accidentally sit down at a bench and copy an electronic circuit and then the case and controls that goes with it?

Bob

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