Lenovo stole a fan's video to promote the foldable Motorola RAZR | Hacker News Reader

Lenovo stole a fan's video to promote the foldable Motorola RAZR

engadget.com

103 pointsluu29 comments

What’s odd about this is how easily it could have been a fan engagement story. Sloppy beyond belief or an intentional faux scandal.

Feels like the latter. When was the last time you saw a high production value rendering of a yet to be released phone for a second tier company?

Pretty sure Lenovo isn't a second tier company...

As far as phone manufacturers go? Maybe third tier.

Google gutted Motorola Mobility for its intellectual property and then sold the carcass to Lenovo.

The smarter employees left for greener pastures even before the sale was complete. What's left isn't even third tier.

The guy's channel has tons of videos of renders of phones from other companies. Remember Occam's razor, the simplest explanation (that a "second tier company" was lazy with their release video and some video editor found the highest res renders he could find without realizing they weren't actually Lenovo's renders) is the likeliest explanation.

It's Hanlon's Razor, not Occam's. Occam's razor is for scientific theories, not human behavior.

> Occam's razor is for scientific theories, not human behavior.

Not at all. Occam's razor says simpler theories (of anything) are more plausible than complex ones. Hanlon's razor says you can't distinguish between malice and stupidity. Occam is clearly the reference mmanfrin meant to make.

I wonder if it being a Chinese company, where copyrights aren't enforced, they felt it wasn't an issue to just use it without informing/asking the fan?

It seems like just contacting the fan and paying him a few bucks and mentioning him would be good.

At the same time some random guy on the internet, you don't know if he really owns the content either.

Still... at least trying would be better than just claiming it yourself.

A Moto fan. Not Lenovo, no?

Odds are it was some random person at an agency or in marketing, or contracted to do some little thing ... and either didn't think about the issue or didn't care to.

Frankly I'm surprised this kind of stuff doesn't happen more often.

Edit: And I'm speaking from experience. Large companies are not as specifically coordinated as people sometimes ascribe them to be. And nobody in marketing or any other dept. wants to deal with legal review of anything if they can avoid it.

It does but unnoticed.

Probably subcontracted so many layers deep that the person who eventually sold some random internet video as their own did not even reach a particularly high hourly rate using the shortcut.

Wait, they're promoting a product that doesn't exist?

Yes, and nobody understands why. Beautiful, isn't it :-)

Post capitalism? You don't need to make anything, just announce products people want to buy, regardless of whether they're actually buildable. Next step, raise billions of $ on the back of the 'product', then presumably sell[1] empty boxes for all those unboxing videos.

[1] It probably won't be selling, it'll probably licencing, or renting, or renting of other peoples boxes, or some combination thereof.

This is not a Kickstarter, it's Lenovo. They have a billion dollars in cash just lying around.

Send them an invoice for the amount of work it took you. $10k per second of footage they used is a good start, with a contract saying you won’t sue for copyright infringement if they pay, and you’ll provide them with non watermarked footage.

If they don’t pay, sue for copyright infringement. Seems like it’d be a clear cut case?

Sounds nice but suing a massive company like this is going to cost way more than $10k

He said 10k/second. At 3:47 for the original full-length video[1] that's pretty good money.

And that's without suing!

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xxfI6-ZltWk

I think the idea was to threaten a suit but hopefully not have to go thru with it.

That's very odd. Using some random YouTuber's video is very unprofessional, but taking that aside what is Lenovo's intention here?

Were they trying to test the market? If so, were they are actually planning on building the phone if the response is good?

A description of the video is in Chinese, translating to something like:

> Lenovo today unveiled its own folding screen mobile phone video in an interview with Sina Technology and other media. The folding mobile phone design looks similar to Motorola's classic Razer. Do you like this lightweight folding phone?

I believe that the video wasn't meant for the English market, so they thought they could get away with it.

Yeah, and the Youtuber used Motorola's logo for his render -- without permission.

Fair-use allows it in the US.

When the company takes the fan’s content it’s stealing. When the fan takes the company’s content it’s fine because there’s no way to obtain the content conveniently or another excuse or any convoluted way to avoid saying it’s stealing.

Are you trying to make a point about piracy?

No, commented on the wrong thread by accident.

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