News from Gamers Nexus. Including some part about the response from Linus regarding the previous video. Linus really likes to jump the gun and digging holes for himself.
Thievery implies intent. I think I’d like to give the benefit of the doubt here and say it not being returned may well have been unintentional, through carelessness or straight up hubris (“I can do whatever I want with stuff people send to me!”). Either way, it’s incredibly bad, but one is obviously worse than the other.
Billet Labs asked for it to be returned. LMG agreed the their request and told Billet Labs “Yes, we will return it to you.” Then LMG auctioned it off. LMG committed theft. There very well may be a valid legal case for Billet Labs to sue for punitive damages if LMG does not give them a sizeable amount of money.
I mean discovery will have to prove intent. What happened was shitty but we do have to remember there are about 120+ people in LTT. Billet labs probably emailed 1 person in the company twice, that person probably wasn’t in logistics or in the team that was organizing LTX. So this is likely a huge fuck up but I think people are acting like they did this just out of spite when really it seems to be an organizational issue that got swept up in the mix. Who ever is the contact for Billet Labs may honestly get their job axed since this is a pretty big fuck up. I know people are trying to paint Linus as the one who did this but I don’t think it is. We can blame him for his shit response and how he made it seem that they were already handling Billet Lab’s with compensation but maybe I’m being optimistic but I honestly think GN’s video was the first Linus has heard about what happened to the prototype besides maybe it being auctioned but I think he wasn’t aware it needed to be returned.
Why side note to start, why do people like start a conversation with “I mean…” when there was nothing said previously? That is a phrase usually reserved for when someone is clarify a previous statement regarding what they meant to say beforehand, that’s why I ask, how do initiate first contact with “I mean…”?
For LMG, the position of the person in contact with Billet Lab is irrelevent. In a healthy company, there is frequent contact between the different deparments during work. Interdepartment agencies. When someone at LMG got the request for the prototype to be returned, it would be their duty and responsivility to pass the memo on to the person(s) involved and notify them in the appropriate position of the request with a statement that it has to packaged up so the individuals who handle all incoming and outgoing packges can get it sent back to Billet Labs. It’s not the person who received the request that is then responsible for the packaging and mailing of it.
It’s different employees in that chain who are responsible and as they complete it they pass it on to the next in line in the process for getting it ready to go out.
Intent like “I’m going to sell this thing”?
Or intent like “I’ve sold the thing and now will pocket the money”?
Intent as in “I know this doesn’t belong to me and I will acquire it and then exchange it for monetary value”
Your two scenarios happened yes, but any number of things could have happened before it that would remove intent to steal and exchange for money, like simply miscommunication between individuals (with their team size, it’s not too far fetched to see that happening)
It absolutely does not. If a package gets delivered to your house by mistake and you sell whatever it is, you are 100% liable for stealing someones mail. Doesn’t matter if you didn’t think the people would ever come for it and you didn’t mean to steal anything.
…unless you’re a tech reviewer that receives hundreds of products a month from people that never expects to get them back.
I don’t know how to be more clear on this, this is a failure on LTT’s part, no question. There should be better processes in place to prevent this from happening. But there’s a difference between knowingly and willfully pawning off something that they knew didn’t belong to them, and incompetently assuming everything everything they sell off has been vetted with the vendor. There’s a large enough team that a miscommunication could have broken down along the chain, somewhere between vendor reps and the person setting up that auction.
Whether intentional or not, they stole trade secrets. There might not be any legal repercussions of there wasn’t intent, but that’s incredibly unethical. Especially given Linus is a public investor in a tech startup, he used his platform to trash another startup and then give away their intellectual property.
