Casetify Hit With Lawsuit As dbrand & JerryRigEverything Allege IP Theft

Low Boon Shen
By Low Boon Shen 4 Min Read
Casetify Hit With Lawsuit As dbrand & JerryRigEverything Allege IP Theft

Casetify Hit With Lawsuit As dbrand & JerryRigEverything Allege IP Theft

There’s a legal war being waged over among the phone case manufacturers: dbrand, (in)famous for social media shenanigans and phone cases, has officially filed a lawsuit against Casetify, for a series of “Inside Out” cases that infringes on the designs made in collaboration with YouTuber JerryRigEverything (Zack Nelson). The channel is famed for smartphone durability tests, and has for a few years released a lineup of “naked” designs that reveal the PCB and components that power the device.

Casetify Hit With Lawsuit As dbrand & JerryRigEverything Allege IP Theft

In a video, Zack has presented a few examples of IP theft by Casetify, as evidenced by the pixelated images used for printing and various hidden “easter eggs” that are associated with dbrand and Zack’s online persona, with one such example being the tagline “glass is glass and glass breaks”. One of the more extreme examples even shows erroneous placements of the camera module on the outer edge of the Galaxy Z Fold4’s case. (dbrand has posted on X providing examples in detail.)

He also went on and claimed that it takes both parties a combined 10,000 hours worth of work to design these cases, as the process of recreating the PCB onto the vinyl wrap is a painstakingly delicate process that involves lots of high-resolution images and post-processing – the latter of which involves adding easter eggs and modifying some minor parts to give it a more visually appealing look.

In a statement provided to The Verge, dbrand CEO Adam Ijaz said: “If CASETiFY had simply created their own Teardown-esque design from scratch, we wouldn’t have anything to take issue with. We are under no illusion that dbrand owns the idea of taking apart phones and scanning them. The fact of the matter is that they repurposed our existing designs for their products, then went to great lengths to conceal their illegitimate appropriation of our work.”

Casetify Hit With Lawsuit As dbrand & JerryRigEverything Allege IP Theft - 20

In true dbrand fashion, the company has also launched a new lineup of X-Ray skins alongside launching a lawsuit – and probably dared Casetify to right-click and save the image again. It’s available in black and white versions, and customers buying these models can get the other color free of charge.

It’s also worth mentioning that unlike the usual cease-and-desist letter (which is basically “don’t do this again, or we’ll sue you” in legal speak) that you see when it comes to infringements, the company has hit Casetify with a federal lawsuit, and is seeking damages worth up into tens of million dollars as it found 117 cases of stolen designs. At the time of this writing, Casetify’s website is currently down for maintenance after a brief period of 504 (Gateway timeout) errors – and there is no official statement provided thus far.

Pokdepinion: dbrand’s social media antics is going to get a whole lot spicier. 

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