The ongoing litigation between Apple and Florida based clonemaker Psystar took an interesting turn recently when Psystar filed for bankruptcy protection late last week. MacObserver broke the story early yesterday, noting:
The Florida court will hold a hearing on June 5 where Psystar’s equity creditors will be revealed — which means if there have been deep pockets behind the company’s fight against Apple, those names will finally come out of the shadows. Psystar’s bankruptcy filing will temporarily slow down Apple’s case in northern California because all legal actions involving the PC maker are automatically put on hold while the bankruptcy court begins its proceedings. The judge overseeing the case will, however, most likely lift that stay within a few months, allowing Apple’s case to start moving forward again.
In total, Psystar owes a bevy of creditors well over $250,000, and while many think that “deep pockets” are working behind the scenes to help fund Psystar, it’s unlikely that we’ll ever learn the true identities of Psystar’s “shadowy” investors, if they in fact exist. If a corporation or individual has helped Psystar out financially, all they would need to do to remain unknown would be to forgive the outstanding debt owed to them by Psystar. Of course, the underlying issue here is how this will affect Apple’s current lawsuit against Psystar. But once all of Psystar’s bankruptcy filings are sorted out by the court, Psystar may soon find itself in a position where it’s unable to pay the high powered California law firm it hired to defend its case. As it stands now, Psystar already owes them over $85,000 for legal services already rendered. While Apple gets sued all the time, the Psystar lawsuit was/is particularly worrisome for Apple as it put Apple’s entire business model of controlling all aspects of the hardware and software into question. If a court ever ruled that Psystar was legally allowed to sell OS X on non-Apple boxes, it would open up the floodgates for others to do the same, and all at the expense of Apple’s premium priced hardware. From the looks of it, though, Psystar’s chances for success are diminishing by the day.
