Dbrand sued Casetify for stealing Teardown case designs

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Smartphone accessory maker Dbrand has sued fellow accessory maker Casetify for ripping off its Teardown case designs. Dbrand alleges—has provided evidence supporting the allegations—that Casetify stole its designs to create its “Inside Out” line of smartphone cases. The evidence provided by the company seemingly shows it is a blatant copy-and-paste job from Casetify.

Dbrand files lawsuit against Casetify for stealing Teardown designs

Dbrand launched its Teardown line of cases for smartphones in December 2019. It teamed up with popular YouTuber Zack Nelson of JerryRigEverything, who is known for tearing apart brand-new phones to reveal their internals. The Teardown cases mock a teardown, featuring a print of the phone’s internal structure. These cases show the inside of the device on the outside. They look pretty cool and unique.

Over the years, Dbrand and Zack have released Teardown cases for dozens of smartphones—Android and iPhones. Zack says he and the accessory maker “go to extreme lengths to ensure that every Teardown skin is an accurate representation of what’s actually on the inside” of the device. This involves removing the back panel to expose the internals, scanning the phone in 2400 DPI resolution, and lots of editing work.

According to Zack, each skin requires around ten hours of editing before producing prototypes, making adjustments, and getting the design ready for mass production. The images below show what a device’s internals look like in the initial scan and after Dbrand is done perfecting it. It’s a lot of work that Casetify decided to just skip, based on what’s shown here.

Dbrand’s skins have little easter eggs in them

But how did Dbrand or Zack find out that Casetify copied their work? After all, a phone’s internals would look the same even if did all the hard work by itself. Well, Dbrand and Zack make some creative adjustments to make the designs pop. If Casetify decided to be creative too, the designs shouldn’t match 100-percent. If not, then the designs should still look a little different.

However, that isn’t the biggest goof-up Casetify made. Dbrand’s Teardown skins feature little easter eggs for fans to find. If you have watched a few JerryRigEverything teardown videos, you have probably noticed that Zack uses the phrase “glass is glass, and glass breaks” on almost every single one of them. This phrase is printed on a ribbon on Dbrand’s Teardown case for the Samsung Galaxy S23 Ultra.

Of course, the phrase doesn’t exist on the phone’s hardware. But Casetify is probably not aware, as the company seemingly didn’t look inside the Samsung flagship to create its Inside Out case for it. Yet its case has the same phrase printed at the same location. This basically shows that the company copied Dbrand’s design. That is just one example of an easter egg Dbrand’s skins have.

Casetify copied pretty much everything

Other non-existent (on phones) things that Dbrand included on its Teardown cases and Casetify copied on its Inside Out cases include Dbrand’s founding date (11/11/11, i.e. November 11th, 2011), R0807 (a reference to Dbrand’s robots), the “All-Seeing Eye” symbol that Dbrand uses on its products, and 11.11Wh battery rating on the Pixel 7 Pro. The Google phone has 19.25Wh of battery capacity but Dbrand printed 11.11Wh to refer to its founding date.

Like with the rest of the design, Casetify didn’t bother verifying it and simply printed what Drband’s case showed. Unsurprisingly, the accessory maker now has a “multi-million dollar” lawsuit against it. Filed in a Toronto court this week, Dbrand’s lawsuit accused the firm of infringing upon its copyrighted works with 45 Inside Out cases (via Engadget). Dbrand is asking for unspecified punitive and exemplary damages.

We will let you know when we have more information about this case. Meanwhile, you can watch the video below where Zack goes into detail about how Casetify stole his and Dbrand’s work.



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