Apple Sues Owner Of White iPhone Kit

Well it seems that Apple has recently filed a lawsuit against Fei Lam, the New York teenager that sold white iPhone 4 conversion kits on his website and who managed to net a pretty figure of $130,000 from his sales. When word hit Apple about this he shut down his website, presumably by the orders of Apple’s lawyers.

This is the same white iPhone conversion kit that Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak himself, among many others, had ordered. This was probably due to the fact that Apple had been teasing the white iPhone 4 for almost a year before it made its appearance, leaving those who desperately wanted a white iPhone 4 to resort to buying this white iPhone conversion kits.

However at the same time Apple has also filed a voluntary dismissal of the case, probably allowing talks of settlement instead. Now the thing is Fei Lam is just a teenager and Apple probably doesn’t need the money that he made from his sales so what this looks like from the outside is a case of a big company bullying the smaller guys.

However on the other side of the coin, it seems that Fei Lam got his hands on the white iPhone front and back plates from a Foxconn employee which makes it illegal to begin with. Now if Fei Lam had designed the plates himself that would be a whole other story, but in this case what he did was take Apple’s property which wasn’t his to begin with, and sold them for a profit, which does merit the patent infringement lawsuit.

So what do you think? Does Apple look like the bully in this story, or was this lawsuit warranted?