Dbrand is suing Casetify for allegedly stealing the teardown designs it uses for skins and cases for Apple and other devices. Dbrand began its extensive collection of internal designs with a skin for the iPhone 13 Pro Max back in July of last year.
Update: Casetify has now removed all of the Inside Out cases from its website, redirecting to its best-sellers, as Dbrand shares close-up images of the easter eggs uses to identify the images (see bottom of piece). Casetify has also tweeted a statement, but reading the replies, that isn’t going well …
Dbrand says that it caught the rival company ripping off and modifying its device scans thanks to a number of easter eggs within its own images.
The company posted a tweet in which it somewhat cryptically announced:
All-new ***** skin drops in 3 hours. Multi-million dollar ******* drops in 12 hours.
The Verge reports that the lawsuit is against Casetify.
The company is suing rival Casetify over claims it blatantly copied Dbrand’s Teardown device skins and cases, which are made to look like the internals of whatever phone, tablet, or laptop you’ve purchased them for.
Casetify originally messed up or cheaped out by selling cases showing the same internals for Apple, Samsung, and Google phones – leading to mocking by Dbrand. It is then claimed to have fixed this by stealing Dbrand images.
This time, the images are consistent with the devices the cases are made for — and Dbrand claims that’s because Casetify stole its designs. However, Dbrand alleges Casetify also attempted to conceal the copycats by rearranging parts of the designs to make them look slightly different. (You can see an example of this in the video embedded above.)
There’s some pretty strong evidence backing up Dbrand’s accusations, too. Dbrand spotted the many Easter eggs it planted within its own designs on Casetify’s Inside Out products. That includes the “R0807” tag, which alludes to Dbrand’s tagline as a brand run by robots, as well as the JerryRigEverything catchphrase “glass is glass and glass breaks.”
The claimed copyright infringement is extensive, with 117 different images cited in the lawsuit.
Dbrand says it holds registered copyrights for each of these products, all of which were registered before Casetify’s product launch.
“If Casetify had simply created their own Teardown-esque design from scratch, we wouldn’t have anything to take issue with,” Dbrand CEO Adam Ijaz tells The Verge. “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.”
Top comment by Tudor
Their [Casetify's] website is down ("under maintenance") as of 6pm London time. The pages to buy the Inside Out cases return 504s.
Not cool, Casetify. Not cool.
Edit 7pm: website barely working, keeps timing out. I got it to load eventually. A Black Friday page and, would you believe it, no mention of the Inside Out cases.
Edit 8pm: Website back up. Inside Out line of cases removed.
That attempt to disguise the origins of the images makes it hard to argue an innocent mistake, says Dbrand, so it is seeking total damages running into eight figures.
Casetify was clearly given no advance warning of the lawsuit, The Verge noting that the cases are still currently on sale on the company’s website (update: now removed).
Update: Dbrand tweeted close-ups of all the easter eggs it found in Casetify’s products:
Casetify has said it is “investigating” the claim, but based on the replies, isn’t making many friends.
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