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The Strange History of Apple and FlatWorld
Fnord666 writes "When a company called FlatWorld Interactives LLC filed suit against Apple just over a year ago, it looked like a typical 'patent troll' lawsuit against a tech company, brought by someone who no longer had much of a business beyond lawsuits. Court documents unsealed this week reveal who's behind FlatWorld, and it's anything but typical. FlatWorld is partly owned by the named inventor on the patents, a Philadelphia design professor named Slavko Milekic. But 35 percent of the company has been quietly controlled by an attorney at one of Apple's own go-to law firms, Morgan, Lewis & Bockius. E-mail logs show that the attorney, John McAleese, worked together with his wife and began planning a wide-ranging patent attack against Apple's touch-screen products in January 2007—just days after the iPhone was revealed to the world."
Am a lawyer, just because your firm has ties doesn't mean every attorney is tied to the company. As long as the attorney is effectively screened from any work involved with the company there is no conflict. It's rules 1.7, 1.8, and 1.10 (1.9 is duty to former clients). If this guy worked, personally, on Apple legal work then there's a problem. I don't know if that's the case. The summary just says he's at the firm so I'm guessing he didn't. But he began planning right after the announcement so maybe he talked with other attorneys that did work on it. That would be a conflict because the screening was not effective.
As usual with law, more facts are needed to know for sure.
IAAL and I can tell you Mr. McAleese will not be a member of the bar much longer. As attorney offenses go, this is toxic / nuclear.
This case will disappear quickly now that the real party-in-interest is revealed.
Those are my principles, and if you don't like them... well, I have others.
Oh and Xerox only sued Apple after Apple sued Microsoft for copyright infringement. The fact is Apple was suing Microsoft for copying technology they themselves copied from PARC. This is typical Apple, presenting themselves as innovators and creators when in fact they are ripping off someone else's technology.
Xerox didn't sell them anything. They were an early investor in Apple and allowed a couple of people from Apple to visit PARC.
And Apple paid Xerox executives for that privilege.
But sure keep deluding yourself
It's a sad sad day when anti-technology trolls start arguing that handing over money in exchange for technology is not "selling"
But keep making up shit to try and look cool bashing Apple. It's worked so well this past decade. They keep on making money hand over fist despite you.
Xerox did go to trial to protect the Star user interface. In 1989, after Apple sued Microsoft for copyright infringement of its Macintosh user interface in Windows, Xerox filed a similar lawsuit against Apple; however, it was thrown out because a three year statute of limitations had passed. (Apple eventually lost its lawsuit in 1994, losing all claims to the user interface).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xerox_Star
Seemingly there are a lot of people here too lazy to use Google.