Credit Card App “Square” Embroiled In Lawsuits Over Patents, Development Claims

Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey is being accused – again – of shoving out someone integral to the development of a hugely popular product. This time it’s Square, a gadget that plugs into cell phones or tablets and allows merchants to use the devices as credit card machines. Dorsey and another man, Jim McKelvey, are by one account co-founders of Square who early on reached out to Prof. Robert Morley, who holds patents on card-reading technologies, for help in development. McKelvey sued Morley in 2010 claiming he was left off a Morley patent. A January 2014 lawsuit from Morley claims he alone invented the card reader and the magnetic stripe decoding algorithms that make Square work, and that Dorsey and McKelvey intentionally left him out of his rightful role of co-founder. The story may sound familiar to those who have followed the saga of Twitter’s early days, when many people speculate that Dorsey elbowed out co-founder Noah Glass.