“Dr. Dre and music mogul Jimmy Iovine have been ordered to pay $25.2m (£19.2m) to a former partner in their headphone company, Beats,” Mark Savage reports for BBC News.
“Steven Lamar claimed credit for the idea of creating a brand of celebrity-endorsed headphones. He took the idea to Dre and Iovine in 2006; and the first Beats headphones were released two years later, based on a design by Robert Brunner,” Savage reports. “The parties later fell out, and Lamar sued over unpaid royalties in 2016.”
“At the centre of their dispute was a 2007 settlement, in which Dre and Iovine agreed to pay Lamar 4% of the base price of every headphone they sold. Only one model, Beats Studio, was specified but Lamar argued the design had been carried over to a dozen different models and sought $130m (£99m) in royalties,” Savage reports. “A jury in Los Angeles decided that three pairs of headphones – the Studio 2 Remastered, the Studio 2 Wireless and the Studio 3 – had design similarities; and ordered that Dre and Iovine should pay Lamar $25,247,350. With the Studio 3 still on sale, the verdict means Lamar will continue to receive royalties in addition to the court-mandated payout.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Seems like some measure of justice has been served, at least.
Beats. A triumph of marketing over sound quality. – MacDailyNews Take, May 8, 2014
Note: Lamar’s legal case was filed before Apple acquired Beats on May 28, 2014, and did not name Apple as a defendant.
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Apple’s Dr. Dre apologizes for past abuse of women, Apple issues statement – August 21, 2015
Wow! That guy gotta nice check! Me? I just want AirPlay 2 to be compatible with iTunes so that I can stream from my iMac to my stereo UNpaired HomePods. (Yes, I know I can pair them, but then they don’t work correctly with iTunes)
No one can get away with NOT paying a lot for BEATS 🙂
Two years to get his due justice. A hell of a lot quicker than Apple can get it.