JerryRigEverything and DBrand Sues Casetify for Copyright Infringement

[wanderingfool2]

35 minutes ago, jagdtigger said:

That is the whole issue as far as i see it, it is a 1-in-1 copy-pasta......

Except the images they showed as an example so far isn't a 1 to 1 comparison.  They shifted around some of the things

[jagdtigger]

27 minutes ago, wanderingfool2 said:

Except the images they showed as an example so far isn't a 1 to 1 comparison.  They shifted around some of the things

Yeah sorry, its only 99.9%  of the original because they took a few minutes to chunk it up then move them slightly vs the gazillions of hours that went into creating the original......

/edit

This is like when someone copied commodere's disk drive FW but switched up the order of the bits in the ROM chip and on the PCB so it still works but if someone dumps the ROM it wont match.

Edited November 23, 2023 by jagdtigger

[wanderingfool2]

22 minutes ago, jagdtigger said:

Yeah sorry, its only 99.9%  of the original because they took a few minutes to chunk it up then move them slightly vs the gazillions of hours that went into creating the original......

/edit

This is like when someone copied commodere's disk drive FW but switched up the order of the bits in the ROM chip and on the PCB so it still works but if someone dumps the ROM it wont match.

Except there is the concept in copyright about what portions of a work are copyrightable.

 

It's the same principle of having someone draw a stylized picture of a building vs taking a picture of the building.  While both works can be copyrighted, there is a stronger claim to anyone reusing the first vs the second...as the second contains elements that they don't have the copyright to specifically.

 

Like I said, I do think dbrand would win...but I don't think it's quite as clear cut as people are making it out to be simply because there is modification and the whole general layout doesn't matter at all.  The part they would I think fall is all the easter eggs that were left in, but the question becomes as a whole does it make much of a difference to the end product.

[jagdtigger]

4 hours ago, wanderingfool2 said:

Except there is the concept in copyright about what portions of a work are copyrightable.

Watch the video, the image they use is not a simple photo/scan with a few added easter eggs. It is very clear 5hat it is a 1-in-1 copy when he switches between theirs and the copy....

[Mark Kaine]

That's an interesting way of doing advertising.  i want one now!  

[Beskamir]

13 hours ago, venomtail said:

Gonna be a weird "case" ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°) cause how can they copyright an xray design...? Doesn't that xray belong to whichever phone has been "xrayed?" The internal exact layount all belong to either Apple, Samsung, Google or whatever.

 

Just seems like a think that cant be copyrighted. Like someone copyrighting an apshalts surface so watchout anyone laying roads, you could accidentaly copy someone elses microspocpic road bond.

 

Like you can't stray too much away from the original. There's a reference baseline for a reason.

That's what I thought at first but watching the video answered that question. He used the same solution map makers use. Adding fake things here and there so that if someone else copies him rather than the original they'll include the fake things too.

[Fasterthannothing]

15 hours ago, Tedster said:

I just watched the video: this will be interesting. And I guess a WAN show topic

 

It's pretty egregious.

Not it's absurdity no one company should be able to patent a freaking X-ray of a device even if they throw some stupid easter eggs in the photo. That would be like someone making a sticker that had a picture of the inside of a watch on it throwing some stupid catch phrases in the picture and then trying to sue because someone turned the picture into a poster. Are we really going to allow precedent for allowing companies to patent something this stupid.

[atxcyclist]

1 hour ago, Fasterthannothing said:

Not it's absurdity no one company should be able to patent a freaking X-ray of a device even if they throw some stupid easter eggs in the photo. That would be like someone making a sticker that had a picture of the inside of a watch on it throwing some stupid catch phrases in the picture and then trying to sue because someone turned the picture into a poster. Are we really going to allow precedent for allowing companies to patent something this stupid.

dbrand/JRE put a lot of effort into creating those x-rays, and another company blatantly copied them and is profiting off someone else' work; That's what this is about. If someone just rips-off another design they open themselves up to getting sued, it's not that complicated of a concept. Casetify could have spent the time and money to get x-rays of things and put their own easter-eggs in there, but they didn't. 

 

My office has proprietary intellectual property we use for our facilities management clients, if someone took our sealed documents and reverse-engineered them without our knowledge, we could and would sue them. That is how business works. It isn't 'absurdity', we spent thousands of hours creating those processes, it is investment on our end and we own that intellectual property. dbrand/JRE invested time and money into creating their products and smartly put identifying marks on them in case some thief steals their work, and good on them for protecting their product designs.

[rOwLp]

1 hour ago, Fasterthannothing said:

Not it's absurdity no one company should be able to patent a freaking X-ray of a device even if they throw some stupid easter eggs in the photo. That would be like someone making a sticker that had a picture of the inside of a watch on it throwing some stupid catch phrases in the picture and then trying to sue because someone turned the picture into a poster. Are we really going to allow precedent for allowing companies to patent something this stupid.

I think you're missing a big part of what was being said in the video. They did not copyright the idea of taking a picture of the insides of a phone and using that as a decal or on a phone case. What DBrand and JRE do own were the images they took of the insides of the phone.

 

Casetify took those images created by DBrand and JRE and slapped them on their cases to sell without the owners permission. If Casetify took their own photos it would've been fine.

[aminit]

I suspect that whoever "designed" the skins for Casetify used AI to generate the design, its just that there isnt enough original teardown skin images on the market to generate from and it ended up stealing most of Dbrand/Zack designs, and them blindly trusting the AI output.

 

I just cant believe that a human doing the stealing (especially on a billion dollar company) would think they could get away with so many obvious mistakes.

[Arika]

Oh man, love the victim card they are playing:

 

 

3 hours ago, aminit said:

I suspect that whoever "designed" the skins for Casetify used AI to generate the design, its just that there isnt enough original teardown skin images on the market to generate from and it ended up stealing most of Dbrand/Zack designs, and them blindly trusting the AI output.

 

I just cant believe that a human doing the stealing (especially on a billion dollar company) would think they could get away with so many obvious mistakes.

 

Ai isn't magic, you can't just say "hey generate me the inside of an iphone 14" and it will grab all the dbrand skins.

 

AI also doesn't do text well and for it to copy dBrand's easter eggs 1-to-1 is incredible damning:

 

and Zack's:

 

The only way it would be remotely possible for any of this to whoops occur is if a model was trained very specifically on just the dbrand skins and NOTHING else, so it's not like they wouldn't have known exactly that they were doing.

[Avocado Diaboli]

5 hours ago, Fasterthannothing said:

Not it's absurdity no one company should be able to patent a freaking X-ray of a device even if they throw some stupid easter eggs in the photo. That would be like someone making a sticker that had a picture of the inside of a watch on it throwing some stupid catch phrases in the picture and then trying to sue because someone turned the picture into a poster. Are we really going to allow precedent for allowing companies to patent something this stupid.

First of all, nobody patented an X-ray. You seem to be confusing nomenclature. Patents, trademarks and copyright aren't the same thing. 

 

Second, the person who creates an image owns the copyright to that image. I don't hold the copyright to what the image depicts, you can go out and recreate the exact picture yourself and use it. But if you intend to use the image I personally took, and depending on the fair use situation, I can order you to stop using it. That's how basic copyright works. Also, if you recreate my work and try to pass it off as mine, basically committing art forgery, you're also on the hook for that.

 

So if we go with your example, if I take a picture of my watch, write a catchphrase across it and sell it as a sticker, if you then take my design, blow it up to poster size and sell it, you're still likely committing copyright infringement.

[aminit]

3 hours ago, Arika said:

The only way it would be remotely possible for any of this to whoops occur is if a model was trained very specifically on just the dbrand skins and NOTHING else, so it's not like they wouldn't have known exactly that they were doing.

That is my thought too, perhaps the lack of original teardown skin on the market if any made the Ai base its generation mostly on Dbrand skin.

 

Of course that is just my wild assumption

[Fasterthannothing]

On 11/23/2023 at 3:01 PM, jagdtigger said:

Yeah sorry, its only 99.9%  of the original because they took a few minutes to chunk it up then move them slightly vs the gazillions of hours that went into creating the original......

/edit

This is like when someone copied commodere's disk drive FW but switched up the order of the bits in the ROM chip and on the PCB so it still works but if someone dumps the ROM it wont match.

 

On 11/24/2023 at 3:02 AM, atxcyclist said:

dbrand/JRE put a lot of effort into creating those x-rays, and another company blatantly copied them and is profiting off someone else' work; That's what this is about. If someone just rips-off another design they open themselves up to getting sued, it's not that complicated of a concept. Casetify could have spent the time and money to get x-rays of things and put their own easter-eggs in there, but they didn't. 

 

My office has proprietary intellectual property we use for our facilities management clients, if someone took our sealed documents and reverse-engineered them without our knowledge, we could and would sue them. That is how business works. It isn't 'absurdity', we spent thousands of hours creating those processes, it is investment on our end and we own that intellectual property. dbrand/JRE invested time and money into creating their products and smartly put identifying marks on them in case some thief steals their work, and good on them for protecting their product designs.

 

 

19 hours ago, Avocado Diaboli said:

First of all, nobody patented an X-ray. You seem to be confusing nomenclature. Patents, trademarks and copyright aren't the same thing. 

 

Second, the person who creates an image owns the copyright to that image. I don't hold the copyright to what the image depicts, you can go out and recreate the exact picture yourself and use it. But if you intend to use the image I personally took, and depending on the fair use situation, I can order you to stop using it. That's how basic copyright works. Also, if you recreate my work and try to pass it off as mine, basically committing art forgery, you're also on the hook for that.

 

So if we go with your example, if I take a picture of my watch, write a catchphrase across it and sell it as a sticker, if you then take my design, blow it up to poster size and sell it, you're still likely committing copyright infringement.

I find it amusing that the king of patent skirting and design trolling has this happen to them. it's literally no different than what dbrand does when they blatantly ripped off the Nintendo switch designs and stick them on a skin with another very similar name.

[Avocado Diaboli]

14 minutes ago, Fasterthannothing said:

I find it amusing that the king of patent skirting and design trolling has this happen to them. it's literally no different than what dbrand does when they blatantly ripped off the Nintendo switch designs and stick them on a skin with another very similar name.

Why even reply to all of us if you're not gonna actually elaborate on anything? dBrand breaking copyright doesn't justify others doing the same with their work. You seem to be full of bad takes.

[HenrySalayne]

39 minutes ago, Fasterthannothing said:

I find it amusing that the king of patent skirting and design trolling has this happen to them. it's literally no different than what dbrand does when they blatantly ripped off the Nintendo switch designs and stick them on a skin with another very similar name.

Thank god, you're pointing this out to us! Nobody could have guessed those bastards at dbrand cloned the skin. My disappointment is unmeasurable and my day is ruined!

Spoiler

 

There is a (legal) difference between closely matching somebody else's work and straight up copying it.

 

 

[Quackers101]

sad they stole from ifixit too.

[atxcyclist]

12 hours ago, Fasterthannothing said:

 

 

 

I find it amusing that the king of patent skirting and design trolling has this happen to them. it's literally no different than what dbrand does when they blatantly ripped off the Nintendo switch designs and stick them on a skin with another very similar name.

The dbrand Switch skins are maybe debatable (though legally not a problem), as their design is similar to the Nintendo one but it’s still actually different; The issue at hand here is a company making a direct copy of an existing product, and selling it without stating it’s a direct copy or getting permission.

 

You clearly just don’t understand this topic at all.

 

 

[jagdtigger]

4 minutes ago, atxcyclist said:

The dbrand Switch skins are a debatable topic, as their design is similar to the Nintendo one but it’s still actually different;

And they dont even claim its theirs (they call it a clone right in the marketing material), they basically mocking nintendont......

[CephDigital]

On 11/23/2023 at 3:14 PM, venomtail said:

Gonna be a weird "case" ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°) cause how can they copyright an xray design...? Doesn't that xray belong to whichever phone has been "xrayed?" The internal exact layount all belong to either Apple, Samsung, Google or whatever.

 

Just seems like a think that cant be copyrighted. Like someone copyrighting an apshalts surface so watchout anyone laying roads, you could accidentaly copy someone elses microspocpic road bond.

 

Like you can't stray too much away from the original. There's a reference baseline for a reason.

Can't remember who I watched that talked about this (I think it was Linus on WAN show?) but it's not just as simple as "take a photo of the internals of a phone and be done" but more like "okay lets change this and this, maybe expose the copper here" etc. There's artistic liberties taken when making these skins to make them look better and ofc, Dbrand has their little easter eggs in them as well. It's the fact that Casetify just straight up copied and pasted them like-for-like is the reason why they're being sued.

[gimmick7015]

While exploring the “JerryRigEverything and DBrand Sues Casetify for Copyright Infringement” issue, I realized a significant point: Disney’s licensing partnership with Casetify. Though Disney isn’t directly involved in the incident, their partnership with Casetify raises questions, especially regarding the consistent enforcement of intellectual property rights.

To address this, I’ve created a petition on change.org, urging Disney to reevaluate their licensing agreement with Casetify. If Disney truly stands for intellectual property rights, they should act accordingly.

 

 

Please consider supporting this cause: https://www.change.org/p/urge-disney-to-revoke-casetify-s-licensing-deal-due-to-design-theft-allegations

[Arika]

57 minutes ago, gimmick7015 said:

To address this, I’ve created a petition on change.org

L.O.L.

good luck...

[Avocado Diaboli]

1 hour ago, gimmick7015 said:

To address this, I’ve created a petition on change.org, urging Disney to reevaluate their licensing agreement with Casetify. If Disney truly stands for intellectual property rights, they should act accordingly.

 

 

I'd really love to know if an online petition ever managed to do anything except generate laughter and ridicule. First off, if you really cared about this, you'd write to Disney's legal department, because they're the ones who should take an interest in whatever their business partners are doing. Second, Disney (and any other corporation, realistically) only care about intellectual property right insofar as they benefit from it. They couldn't care less if someone else's rights get violated unless they suffer any consequences as a result.