He submitted the book to the Tetris Company, but Apple is who he’s suing. Also, it’s fairly common for large companies to receive unsolicited materials and reject them without reviewing them in order to protect themselves from lawsuits like this.
But yeah, if any evidence comes up in discovery, that would change things.
So his claim is just that they copied the “spy thriller” tone of his book? I did a single PowerPoint slide on Tetris last year and got a pretty similar vibe from the Wikipedia page, so I don’t think it’s impossible they came up with that independently. Ultimately I think it’ll be difficult to prove unless there are fictional scenes in both that are fairly similar. Anything that actually happened that’s similar he couldn’t prove they got from his book. All this to say it’s definitely not impossible they were inspired by his book, I imagine stuff like that happens all the time. I’m just not sure he will be able to prove that enough to win.
They had multiple people that experienced these things first hand helping develop the script. So even if there isn’t a published article, they easily could’ve just been told by a first hand source.