A former partner of the Beats headphone company has been awarded $25.2m (£19.2m) in unpaid royalties by a US jury, with Dr Dre and Jimmy Iovine footing the bill.
Steven Lamar claimed in a lawsuit against the pair of music moguls that he came up with the idea for the Beats USP as a line of celebrity-endorsed headphones in 2006, and was originally seeking a $130m payout.
In a 2007 settlement, Dre and Iovine had agreed to pay Lamar 4 per cent of every sold pair of headphones' base price. This only applied to one model, Beats Studio, but Lamar has since argued that the same design was carried over across all Beats models.
A decision reached today in Los Angeles concluded that the design in question was evidently used in three models: the Studio 2 Remastered, the Studio 2 Wireless and the Studio 3.
As the latter is still on sale today, Lamar will also continue to receive royalties for the Studio 3 in addition to the final $25.2m payout.
Lamar's lawyer Brian Melton told Billboard in a statement:
"[Dre and Iovine] tried to paint him as some guy who was just there at the right time and the right place, and they already had the idea."
"I don't think that was it at all and I think we proved just the opposite: That before they met Lamar, they hadn't thought about this and he gave it to them on a silver platter."
Beats was acquired by Apple Music for $3bn in 2014. As the case was filed before that date, Apple was not included in the lawsuit.
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