Tech YouTuber JerryRigEverything and Dbrand, the device skin/case company he’s been partnered with since 2019, are suing CASETiFY for allegedly stealing their popular Teardown designs and selling them as its own “Inside Out” collection.
The duo have filed a multimullion-dollar copyright infringement suit against Hong Kong-based CASETiFY, and in his latest YouTube video, JerryRigEverything (aka Zack Nelson) breaks down just why he thinks they’ve got a good shot at hitting CASETiFY in the wallet.
To produce their Teardown line, Nelson and Dbrand create hyper, hyper, hyper-detailed scans of the internals of devices like iPhones. They then print those scans on skins and cases so people can see–and show off–what their tech actually looks like inside.
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The scanning and creation process is a lengthy one, which Nelson walks through in the video. He also points out that a key part of the Teardown line is that each image is slightly altered to contain one or even a few easter eggs that represent things important to him and/or to Dbrand.
For example, in the Teardown skin/case for the Samsung Galaxy S23 Ultra, Nelson included a little blue tab with a phrase he commonly uses: “Glass is glass and glass breaks.”
That tab and phrase are not present in normal Galaxy S23 Ultra internals, so if another company were to try making their own cases with a similar internals-on-the-outside idea, they wouldn’t be there.
That’s why, when CASETiFY released a Galaxy S23 Ultra skin and case as part of its new Inside Out line and “Glass is glass and glass breaks” was included, it raised red flags.
Nelson and Dbrand had been aware of CASETiFY for a while. CASETiFY tried producing Teardown-esque internals-on-the-outside cases in 2022, but they weren’t nearly on the same level as Dbrand: CASETiFY used the same default iPhone image for every device, and it was a low-res image to boot.
Then, a few months later, a fan alerted Nelson and Dbrand to CASETiFY’s new line of cases, which no longer used the same iPhone image for every device, but used real images of each device’s internals.
The problem is, some of the details in CASETiFY’s images are, as we mentioned above, easter eggs only found in Teardown products. Those easter eggs are the backbone of Nelson and Dbrand’s lawsuit, which Nelson says “isn’t about the money. Theft is just not cool.”
“CASETiFY is not a mom-and-pop shop,” he adds. “They are a global brand with a nearly $1 billion valuation. With a B. Considering their size and cashflow, I don’t see why they couldn’t just buy a few phones, take it apart, and do the work themselves. And honestly, if they had, I would love it. Competition is a marvelous thing. I know how much work goes into creating a Teardown product, and if someone wants to create decent competition, I’m all for it. But hopefully you can see with everything that I’ve shown you, fair competition isn’t the route that CASETiFY decided to take.”
Nelson and Dbrand’s suit is a federal lawsuit targeting a non-U.S.-based company, so the whole endeavor will be a slog–and ultimately, Nelson says, “There is a real possibility that no one wins here.”
He says if he is awarded money, he’ll put it into his wheelchair design and production company, Not A Wheelchair, to bulk up equipment and “give away wheelchairs for free as long as I can.”
After the suit was filed and Nelson’s video went live, CASETiFY pulled all of the Inside Out cases off its website.
