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Lego and the IP Conundrum
Packetknife writes: "Business 2.0 has an article on Lego and the development and business issues surrounding the Mindstorms product line. The article concentrates on intellectual property issues and the role of hackers in the development of Mindstorms. The hook to the OSS movement is obvious in the article." Interesting piece about Lego trying not to bite the hand that feeds it, even though the temptation is strong.
http://www.noga.de/legOS/
http://legos.sourceforge.net/
Apple sued companies (particularly Franklin Computer Corp.) that violated it's patents. IBM *encouraged* people to hack and clone their BIOS.
No, the lawsuits were not about patents but about copyrights. The Apple II ROM didn't have a syscall interface like PC BIOS did; A2 syscalls were merely jsr instructions to the entry point in ROM of the function. Because this restricted the possible length of each function's binary code, it was almost impossible to make a 100% Apple compatible ROM without making it byte-identical to Apple's.
But the real reason Apple sued is because their contract with Microsoft required them to do so. Microsoft owned the copyright on the Basic interpreter in Apple II Plus and later computers.
Guess which type of computer became the most successful?
The one with the more extensible API. IBM designed its BIOS syscalls around a realization that it would eventually have to change the internal structure of its BIOS in later revisions to the PC (e.g. XT and AT).
However, the LEGO case isn't about patents or copyrights; it's about trademarks, as the name "LegOS" gives a false appearance of a LEGO product. LEGO doesn't want to tech-support third-party software that could potentially damage expensive sensors and motors.
Will I retire or break 10K?
1) This exact article was done by Forbes 2 years ago. At that time, Lego was very happy to have Markus and other folks hacking on legOS. If anyone can find a 'free' link to that article, I'd appreciate it, but the Forbes archives are not open so I can't link to it. Sources of amusement: that Business 2.0 feels that this is original or interesting writing.
2) The article (and Lego, apparently) act as if Markus still maintains legOS. He hasn't committed to legOS CVS or spoken to the mailing lists in over 18 months (last post to lugnet was in March 2000.) He also doesn't maintain the 'official' website anymore- the one on noga.de hasn't been updated in a similar length of time and has been supplanted as the canonical reference for legOS by legOS.sourceforge.net.
3) Lego has known about legOS since at least Feb. of 1999, when their PR people told Wired that "'People have also done stuff [created programming tools and components like LegOS] on their own as well, and that's fine,' Dion said." For them to change their minds now, more than 30 months later, is pretty low. I can't afford to fight it (I'm the defacto maintainer of legOS and coordinated the last release) but I'm fairly certain that a decent copyright lawyer could demonstrate that 30 months of knowledge and lack of action over a supposed violation makes the violation non-actionable.
Anyway... I'm not Markus, so I can't really answer questions about this. But I can say that this whole episode is pretty disgusting. I hope Lego will come forward and clear the air, and soon.
IAAL,BIANLY
IANYL ("I am not your lawyer")
/existance/ or /use/ of NQC or LegOS. They could try to sue (as mentioned in the article) because these products, if used with the lego mindstorms hardware, could cause failures that Lego wouldn't be able to support. This would indirectly tarnish Lego's name and cause losses. At least that's the theory. It wouldn't take a hell of a lot of effort for a defense attorney to show that since the products themselves are only usable with Lego's products, that the existance of the products directly benefit Lego's sales. And by Lego's own admission, their sales are vastly higher /because/ of the existance of NQC and LegOS than they would otherwise be. Since users of NQC and LegOS don't approach Lego for tech support (Lego has terrible Mindstorms tech support), the claim that failures in NQC or LegOS would tarnish Lego's name is also easy to refute.
/is/ in reference to the trademark holder or its products),
Lego has no real basis for a lawsuit based on the
But that's about existance and use.
LegOS has a naming problem. It possesses a name that is textually identical to a registered trademark of Lego. While every person has an automatic, unrestricted, nonexclusive use trademark to their own names (see McDonald vs McDonald's Corporation, England (I don't know which court), 1989), those trademarks generally only apply to a person's actual use name. While trademark applications have to specify the visual presentation of the trademarked phrase as well as the phrase itself, courts have generally applied trademark protection to any textually identical string, because of the rendering limitations of the Internet, newsprint, and other general printed matter. Since the author of LegOS can only claim the use of the word "Leg" as an English language translation of his real name, that use protection doesn't apply. A very good lawyer might be able to convince a court to allow use protection of translations as well, but it would be hard.
In order to prove trademark infringement, the plaintiff has to show 3 things (on top of the claim of trademark, which is a trivial claim to make):
1) the use of the trademark is not in reference to the trademark holder or its products,
2) the trademark is used in a way that is likely to cause confusion in the minds of third parties (read: those third parties might conclude that the use
and 3) such a confusion would cause harm, in fact or faith, to the trademark holder, its products, or the trademark itself.
Even if all three are shown, the defendant could still win if he can show that the trademarked phrase has already entered the common vocabulary in reference to the general class of products or services to which the product or service specifically named by the trademark belongs. Two examples of this exemption are "xerox" and "kleenex". These two are registered trademarks referring to a company and a series of products in the first place, and a series of products in the second place. But both have been ruled to have entered the common vocabulary in reference to the process of photocopying, and facial tissue, respectively. The holders of those trademarks (Xerox and Kimberly-Clark) still engage in legal scare tactics to prevent the general use of what was formerly their exclusive trademarks, but they almost never go all the way to court unless they have an alternate attack avenue to fall back on.
It would be easy for Lego to show the first and second points to a court's satisfaction. Harder to show the third, but not all that hard. And it would be very difficult (if not impossible) for the author of LegOS to show that the exemption applies.
In other words: I would conclude, on the basis of the information currently available to me as a person who has not been retained or consulted by any party to the matter, that it would be relatively easy and inexpensive for Lego to successfully sue over the naming of the alternate Lego Mindstorms firmware that is currently referred to as LegOS.
-- Nolite audere delere orbiculum rigidum meum.
I'm part of the legOS project on Sourceforge (though certainly not amongst the more active members). This is the first time I've heard of anybody suing anyone over the name legOS. I'm sure I would have seen something on our mail list by now, if the corporation had a problem.
The Lego Mindstorms Robotics Invention set is the coolest toy ever created. Th legOS project has no intention of diluting the trademark of the Lego corporation. Our documents clearly state we are not part of, nor sanctioned by the Lego corporation.
All we want to do is take a fun toy, and have a hell of a lot of fun with it. Being hackers (not crackers), fun involves reverse engineering and coding in C and assembly language.
-- Will program for bandwidth