Floridian Thomas Ross has filed a $10 billion lawsuit against Apple, claiming the company stole his design idea for a mobile phone / PC, which he came up with in 1992 – 15 years prior to Steve jobs first introducing the iPhone.
According to court records, Ross designed three hand-scripted technical drawings of the device between May 23, 1992 and September 10, 1992. He put together a patent application in November that year for a device that “embodied a fusion of design and function in a way that never existed prior to 1992.”
Ross claims Apple’s devices “are substantially the same as his technical drawings of the ERD, and that Apple's three-dimensional derivative devices (iPhone, iPod, iPad), embody the non-functional aesthetic look and feel”.
Now, while the phone is rectangular and does have a screen, there’s not much that is technically similar to the iPhone — it includes a cell antenna, MS-DOS, solar cell, and a 3.5-inch diskette drive.
Perhaps most glaring, though, is the fact that the Ross device has an actual, physical keyboard to it, which runs counter to one of the iPhone’s biggest innovations and design accomplishments — that it came without a keyboard.
Technical discrepancies aside, the applications filed by Ross are drawn in an extremely informal manner, which would make it very difficult for anyone to understand and / or approve. Also, the patents that Ross filed for aren’t actually patents anymore, as he failed to pay the appropriate registration fees. Formally, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office declared the application “abandoned” in 1995.
Ross also failed to copyright his technical drawings with the U.S. Copyright Office in 2014.
Paperwork discrepancies aside, Ross claims Apple resorted to “dumpster diving” when creating the iPhone and other devices. “Instead of creating its own ideas, Apple chose to adopt a culture of dumpster diving as an R&D strategy,” Ross's lawsuit says.
In addition to the $10 billion Ross is seeking for damages, he is also seeking 1.5 percent royalty on Apple’s sales — this comes out to approximately $3-4 billion a year. Ross claims he continues to experience “great and irreparable injury that cannot fully be compensated or measured in money.” He has demanded a jury trial, adding that he was “the first to file a device so designed and aggregated as to have created a novel combination of media and communication tools… whose identity was, since then, hijacked and exploited by Apple's iPhones, iPods, iPads and others”.
If you’re interested in continuing to follow this case, Ross v. Apple, Inc., it was filed with the Florida Southern District Court on June 27, 2016. The case number assigned to it is 0:2016cv61471.
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