Jon Prosser, Famed Apple Leaker, Sued by Apple for IP Theft
Eric Slivka, reporting for MacRumors:
While the Camera app redesign didn’t exactly match what Apple unveiled for iOS 26, the general idea was correct and much of what else Prosser showed was pretty close to spot on, and Apple clearly took notice as the company filed a lawsuit today (Scribd link) against Prosser and Michael Ramacciotti for misappropriation of trade secrets.
Apple’s complaint outlines what it claims is the series of events that led to the leaks, which centered around a development iPhone in the possession of Ramacciotti’s friend and Apple employee Ethan Lipnik. According to Apple, Prosser and Ramacciotti plotted to access Lipnik’s phone, acquiring his passcode and then using location-tracking to determine when he “would be gone for an extended period.” Prosser reportedly offered financial compensation to Ramacciotti in return for assisting with accessing the development iPhone.
Apple says Ramacciotti accessed Lipnik’s development iPhone and made a FaceTime call to Prosser, showing off iOS 26 running on the development iPhone, and that Prosser recorded the call with screen capture tools. Prosser then shared those videos with others and used them to make re-created renders of iOS 26 for his videos.
Lipnik’s phone contained a “significant amount of additional Apple trade secret information that has not yet been publicly disclosed,” and Apple says it does not know how much of that information is in the possession of Prosser and Ramacciotti.
Lipnik’s name stood out to me because I remember when he worked at Apple. His X account has now been set to private — with his bio saying “Prev. Apple” — but his Mastodon account is still up and running as of Friday morning. Here’s a post from the day he started at Apple, dated November 6, 2023:
I have some extremely exciting news to share! Today is my first day at Apple on the Photos team! So excited to work with these incredible people to continue building a great product!
Lipnik, from what I remember, was well involved with the Apple enthusiast network before he landed a job at Apple, and so was Ramacciotti, who goes by the name “NTFTW” on X and Instagram. (His accounts went private early Friday morning, but his last post was July 16.) After reading the lawsuit, this doesn’t seem like an implausible story to me, knowing these people and how close they were before Lipnik went silent, presumably because Apple Global Security scared him off. From the suit, it doesn’t appear like Lipnik is being sued, which I agree with, knowing that his only sin was failing to protect the development devices given to him. He wasn’t personally involved in any leaks — only Ramacciotti and two unidentified others were, according to an email Apple’s legal team received from an unidentified source.
The email — attached in the lawsuit — links to two videos from Prosser, one of which has already been removed. The other is titled “Introducing iOS 19 | Exclusive First Look” and still remains online as of Friday morning. It contains some rough mockups of the Liquid Glass tab bar in apps like Apple TV, as well as the redesigned Camera app. While I wouldn’t say the video is spot on, it does include some identifiable characteristics of the final operating systems. Apparently, the details in these mockups are from screenshots gathered on Lipnik’s development iPhone, which Prosser says are “…littered with identifiers to help Apple find leakers. So instead of risking anyone’s jobs or lives, we’ve recreated what we’ve seen.” Masterful gambit.
It’s unclear how this anonymous emailer knew these details were stolen from Lipnik’s device. Apple’s lawsuit simply states how it received an “anonymous tip email,” which leads me to believe that it wasn’t an Apple engineer working on iOS 26 who stumbled upon Prosser’s video and recognized the interface as resembling the final version. It had to have been another third-party interloper who knows Prosser or Lipnik well enough to have been near the FaceTime call they describe in the email: “There was a FaceTime call between Prosser and… a friend of Lipnik’s where the… interface was demonstrated to Prosser… Prosser also has been sharing clips from the recorded FaceTime call with Apple leakers.” So either this anonymous reporter is (a) a confidant of Prosser’s who watched the clips, or (b) a friend of Lipnik’s who heard about the call from him. It’s worth noting that Sam Kohl, a YouTuber who used to podcast with Prosser, recently discontinued the show.
However the plan might have been foiled, the details in the suit are truly astonishing. Ramacciotti sent Lipnik an iMessage audio recording detailing his plan, which Lipnik then forwarded to Apple, probably to protect himself. Prosser, according to Apple, contracted Ramacciotti for this and offered payment if he stole the device and gave Prosser access to images. Apple makes this very clear in its lawsuit to prevent ambiguity and directly tie Prosser to Ramacciotti’s burglary, which makes sense legally because if Ramacciotti and Ramacciotti only stole the device and gave Prosser access to it incidentally, Prosser would have the First Amendment right to report on it. But because Prosser himself, through Ramacciotti as a third party, procured the device, it constitutes a violation of trade secrets.
Press in the United States has overarching protections against lawsuits from private companies. The press, according to the First Amendment, can report on leaked information, even if laws were broken by some third party to gain access to that information. A canonical example of this is when WikiLeaks published emails stolen from the Democratic National Committee leading up to the 2016 election, sent by Russian hackers illegally. Despite their source, the Clinton campaign had no right to sue WikiLeaks for publishing confidential information. In contrast, if WikiLeaks itself hacked into the Clinton campaign’s communications and wrote a story, it would have the right to sue. Reporting on leaked information isn’t illegal; doing crimes to access that leaked information is. (Julian Assange, WikiLeaks’ founder, eventually pled guilty to espionage, but that is unrelated to the DNC email controversy.)
Apple, in the lawsuit, explicitly says Prosser procured the stolen intellectual property by contracting Ramacciotti, a friend of Lipnik’s, for the development iPhone. If Prosser hadn’t conspired with Ramacciotti, Apple couldn’t sue him for intellectual property theft because reporting on stolen property isn’t a crime. But, according to Apple, he did, and that makes him party to the alleged crime.
Prosser disputes this reading of his involvement, but notably, doesn’t dispute the fact that Ramacciotti did indeed steal the development iPhone. Prosser put out this post on X shortly after the MacRumors story broke:
For the record: This is not how the situation played out on my end. Luckily have receipts for that.
I did not “plot” to access anyone’s phone. I did not have any passwords. I was unaware of how the information was obtained.
Looking forward to speaking with Apple on this.
“I was unaware of how the information was obtained.” Prosser is distancing his involvement not with the stolen data itself, but with how it was obtained. I’m not a lawyer, but it’s obvious Prosser consulted with one before posting this. It’s worth noting Apple, too, has receipts, most notably an audio recording from Ramacciotti in his own voice saying to Lipnik that he would be paid for stealing data off the iPhone. That’d be damning evidence, and I’d love to see what Prosser has to counteract it. I trust a multi-trillion-dollar technology company’s lawyers over a YouTuber any day, as much as I’ve enjoyed Prosser’s coverage over the years.