this post was submitted on 15 Aug 2023
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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.
We are outsiders in this situation. We don't know where the failure is, it could be anyone in the chain. From the person who received the requests (who didn't send it forward) to the people in logistics who were meant to handle the shipping/packaging of it (or any other person in the chain who messed up). My point was people are pinning blame on Linus and he is partly responsible seeing as he is the "owner" of the company but its pretty obvious he really wasn't in the loop for much of this billet labs thing beside his decision not to reshoot the video.
I say the person who was the contact for Billet Labs was the likely broken link seeing as there were multiple messages and the logistics would probably have noticed the error of a part needing to be sent back being set to the auction for LTX.
I think people are acting like most companies are optimal business where there is little breakdown in these kind of things but from my own experience these kind of breakdowns can happen easily and sometimes very frequently. Many people sort of forget many of these youtube companies are small businesses that happen to expand on short notice. So many of them get stuck in the mindset of small businesses and that causes major problems down the line. A very similar example I see here is like Roosterteeth, who had a major falloff in recent years. They grew very rapidly and many of the problems revealed come back to their small business mindset not adapting with their expansion.
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.
Sure it's unethical, lazy, sloppy, plus any number of adjectives. But as they say: "Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity"