
Lenovo stole a fan's video to promote the foldable Motorola RAZR - luu
https://www.engadget.com/2019/05/17/lenovo-motorola-razr-promo-video-stolen-waqar-khan/
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bredren
What’s odd about this is how easily it could have been a fan engagement story.
Sloppy beyond belief or an intentional faux scandal.

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colordrops
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?

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

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joezydeco
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.

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sonnyblarney
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.

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usrusr
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.

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

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

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benj111
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.

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

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GuiA
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?

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fenwick67
Sounds nice but suing a massive company like this is going to cost way more
than $10k

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irjustin
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](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xxfI6-ZltWk)

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ma2rten
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?

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r3bl
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.

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

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RandomBacon
Fair-use allows it in the US.

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paulcole
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.

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Causality1
Are you trying to make a point about piracy?

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paulcole
No, commented on the wrong thread by accident.

