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posted by on Tuesday January 10 2017, @10:49PM   Printer-friendly
from the life-at-the-cutting-edge dept.

Razer is a company that makes laptops and computer peripherals such as keyboards, mice, etc. The CEO announced on Monday that two Project Valerie laptop prototypes were stolen from their booth at the Consumer Electronics Show:

In a Facebook post early Monday, Razer CEO Min-Liang Tan said he'd "just been informed that two of our prototypes were stolen from our booth at CES today."

"We treat theft/larceny, and if relevant to this case, industrial espionage, very seriously — it is cheating, and cheating doesn't sit well with us," Tan wrote, possibly suggesting a competitor stole the machines. "Penalties for such crimes are grievous and anyone who would do this clearly isn't very smart." Tan added that Razer has filed "the necessary reports" and is now working with CES management and law enforcement to catch whoever stole the prototypes. He encouraged anyone with information about the theft to reach out to Razer's legal team.

Also at Computerworld.

tomsHARDWARE has some updated info:

The theft occurred during what was likely a chaotic teardown of Razer's suite on the Las Vegas Convention show floor. Note that there's a $25,000 reward for information leading to the guilty party, good for a year from today.


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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 11 2017, @05:04AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 11 2017, @05:04AM (#452370)

    And how do they recoup the cost of development if everybody can just steal their work?

    I have serious issues with the way that IP is handled, but hardware patents are absolutely necessary to ensure that the companies developing the products have some hope of recouping their costs. Without that, why would anybody bother to try and move things forward? It costs a ton of money to bring a product to market and for a lot of this stuff, the period for recouping the costs is only a matter of a few years, or even a few months.

    This isn't like software patents or copyrights that have become rather grotesque, the hardware patents are still relatively sane.

  • (Score: 5, Interesting) by bzipitidoo on Wednesday January 11 2017, @06:35AM

    by bzipitidoo (4388) on Wednesday January 11 2017, @06:35AM (#452383) Journal

    No, patents are not necessary. Payment is. Patents are merely bargaining power. It should be possible to pay inventors for their efforts, without patents. Possible to come up with fairer valuations, without patents.

    The worst part is the basic idea intellectual property is founded upon. The notion that people can own ideas, and trade them as if they were material goods, is inherently flawed. When you call copying ideas "stealing", you buy into that flawed thinking. Also, the patent system has too many unintended bad side effects. It's worth considering whether the whole system ought to be scrapped.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 11 2017, @08:29PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 11 2017, @08:29PM (#452676)

      the patent system has too many unintended bad side effects

      Citation needed

      • (Score: 2) by bzipitidoo on Wednesday January 11 2017, @11:21PM

        by bzipitidoo (4388) on Wednesday January 11 2017, @11:21PM (#452769) Journal

        The stated intent of the patent and copyright system is to promote progress. As you suggest, it is likely the real intent of the lobbying of recent decades is to create monopolies over things which shouldn't have been monopolized, and the devil with progress. For instance, software patents. Cynical, and not the original intent. They want money, and they don't care how they get it. If they can sucker the legal system into handing them "damages", and doing the dirty work of policing for "infringement", they will, as they've shown many times.

        Of course patent trolls don't care what kind of stinking mess they create. Why the judges bought their fallacious arguments is the question. Were the judges bribed or suborned somehow, or were they fooled? I, like many others, tend to think most judges weren't corrupted, they just didn't get it. Can't say the legal teams of the defense have done the best job either. Soon as the case turns into a question of whether infringement occurred, rather than whether there was anything to infringe, anything infringeable, they lose a major point of the defense.