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There's no obligation to defend your copyright to maintain it. You can choose who to sue and not to sue as you please.

Laches. If a copyright holder contends that infringement has occurred but does not purse legal action, then they risk losing the ability to sue later. They don't have to sue right away but the law recognizes a reasonable time period. Suing years later. See Petrella v. Metro Goldwyn Mayer where a screenplay was written and copyrighted in 1963. According to the plaintiff, the movie Raging Bull (1978) infringed on it but the plaintiff did not sue until 2009. The courts handed summary judgment against the plaintiff not even considering the merits of the plaintiff's case but only deciding that waiting 30 years to sue was not allowed.

Judges don't always go along with the agreements. Former employees of Arthur Anderson were allowed out of their agreements when they fled the firm due to the massive fraud scandal following Enron. Edwards v. Arthur Andersen LLP The Death of Non-Competition Agreements?

You can't go to some third world pesthole, print up a bunch of books and then import them into the US.

Read the backstory properly. You are way off the mark here. What this is about is basically this (Using roughly your example):

CompanyA prints books. They do so in the US and also in thirdWorldPesthole.
CompanyB sells books in the US bought from CompanyA.
CompanyB finds CompanyC that buys the books from CompanyA that are printed in thirdWorldPesthole, and CompanyB buys these books from CompanyC and also sells them in the US.

Becuase CompanyA sells the books much cheaper in thirdWorldPesthole, CompanyA now takes CompanyB to court because it says it controls the product US, no matter where it came from - even a legal sale such as this.
This is where CompanyB (the seller) argues this with first sale doctrine. It bought the books legally. It has the legal right to do what it wants with them - such as selling them cheaper than the US printed books sell for.

Thanks for flying Fluffeh airways, always happy to take you back on course with the thread.

Sorry. LordSid and Snowgirl are right. If you hire someone as a 1099 contractor, the code produced belongs to the programmer, not the person hiring them. Here's another good article regarding works for hire. These people thought they could hire the guy cheap as a 1099, not pay benefits or taxes, and then take ownership of libraries he produced years before meeting them? If I were Kevin Partner, I would just tell them to shove it. These people are unbelievable.

If they didn't pay as agreed, their ass would be in court. They'd not only pay what they owed with interest, but they'd be on the hook for legal fees and court costs as well. If I didn't think they were big enough to withstand that without folding, I'd sell it to a collection agency for whatever I could get. Then at least I would be comforted knowing I made their credit into shit for doing that and that someone was harassing them daily for the rest of eternity.

Section 1498(b) of title 28, United States Code, contains the waiver of immunity for copyright infringement. As the Federal Circuit pointed out, it "grants copyright owners a right of action for copyright infringement against the United States, subject to three provisos." First, there is no right of action where the employee "was in a position to order, influence, or induce use of the copyrighted work by the Government." Next, there is no right of action where the employee prepared the work as part of his or her "official functions." Finally, there is no right of action when "Government time, material, or facilities were used" in the creation.

http://www.theiplawblog.com/archives/-copyright-law-were-the-government-and-were-here-to-copy-blueport-co-v-united-states.html

Actually they shouldn't be trying too hard. Knowingly infringing on a patent is triple damages. So do it unknowingly if you must.

This was actual legal advice given to me, so it's sound. In so many words he said it's far better given the current system to stick your head in the sand and pretend patents don't exist, because it's nearly impossible to write anything withing infringing something and it's better to wait for them to come after you.. and when they do being ignorant of the patent is much cheaper than knowing about it.

Not all lawyers give sound legal advice anymore than all programmers write sound software code. The advice you received was probably based on an interpretation of Underwater Devices, Inc. v. Morrison-Knudsen Co. 717 F.2d 1380 (Fed. Cir. 1984), where a company received two letters from the patent holder giving actual notice of the patent but did not assess the validity of the patent or ascertain whether the company was likely to infringe on the patent. There have been multiple opinions since then that have made it harder for a patent holder to prove willful infringement.

Is it better to stick your head in the sand so that if you get hit with a patent lawsuit you only have to pay damages instead of treble damages? Or is it better to take a look around a bit to see what's out there, identifying the patents that are easy to find, and avoiding infringement in the first place?

There can be a lot of low-hanging fruit out there. If you are mimicking someone's features, check to see if they received any patents or have filed an application. Try to identify patent classes that relate to your core technology, then skim through the abstracts to see if anything troublesome catches your eye. If you think the risk of infringement is high, get a lawyer involved (it'll probably be cheaper since you did the ground work of identifying the risk in the first place). If you don't think the risk is high, write a memo saying why you don't think it's a high risk. At least then you have evidence that you were being careful, and you may be able to avoid infringement altogether, which is even better.

These busts are nothing compared to the container loads full of pirated CD's, DVD's, cosmetics, toys, bikes, medicine, clothing, batteries, cameras, and electronics coming in from China. The goods coming in from China look identical to the legitimate item, except that sometimes the batteries explode due to defects in cloning the original and the medicine, costmetics, and food sometimes kill and/or poison. If our government fails to contain China, the US will become to China what England was to the 13 Colonies. If the RIAA really wants to stop mass piracy and copyright violations, they should start with the container ships and the Walmart supply chains.

P.S. - Take my advice, don't feed the wheat-gluten from China to your pets.