“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,” Joe Mullin reports for Ars Technica.
“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,” Mullin reports. “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.”
Mullin reports, “Jennifer McAleese reached out to numerous ‘troll patent’ companies, as she called them, convinced that she and Milekic had an ‘excellent position against Apple’ if and when they chose to sue. She e-mailed top patent lawyers at Google and Nokia, competitors known to be in patent clashes with Apple. The whole time she was advised by her husband, a lawyer who had access to reams of confidential Apple data — but who says he never touched it. (Apple doesn’t see it that way.)”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: This guy must have sworn his lawyer’s oath in the state of Betrayal.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “Tayster” for the heads up.]
