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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."
I doubt it will disappear.
Apple will now have recourse against the specific attorney and maybe his law firm and the original patent holder.
In this specific case, I don't think Apple will say "Let bygones be bygones." They will want every cent of their costs paid at the very least and damages due to a corrupted counsel not doing their best for Apple's interests because of the conspiracy between known and unknown attorneys.