Lego Loses Its Unique Right To Make Lego Blocks

tsa writes "The European Department of Justice has decided that the Danish company Lego does not have exclusive rights to the lego building block anymore (sorry, it's in Dutch). Lego went to court after a Canadian firm had made blocks that were so like lego blocks that they even fit the real blocks made by Lego. The European judge decided that the design of the lego blocks is not protected by European trademarks and so anyone can make the blocks." If true, hopefully this will open doors for people interested in inexpensive bulk purchase of bricks of specific sizes and colors. Perhaps at long last I can build a life-sized Hemos statue for my office.

Comments

Cheap = Good for parents

[TrickFred]

My kids have been playing with Mega Bloks for years. When you can buy big buckets of them for $20 when Lego costs $100 or more for the bigger sets, well, the choice is obvious.

Re:Cheap = Good for parents

[Fallingcow]

I got a huge Mega Blocks tyrannosaurus set one year for Christmas.

I never managed to assemble it--not for lack of trying, but because the blocks weren't capable of supporting the structure. Legos would have done it, no problem, but the Mega Blocks invariably came apart around 1/3 to 1/2 of the way through. Any more, and they'd fall apart under the weight. My parents even tried glueing some parts when they saw how much it sucked, but that didn't help; it would just break in different places.

No grip. Can't build anything big with them. Certainly can't move even mid-sized things constructed from them, let alone play with your constructions. LAME.

ISO Standard

[ryanguill]

I think they ought to take the ruling in stride and just open source the bricks. Make them an ISO standard, but continue to provide quality over quantity. Then let the Canadian company do the cheap bricks so that we can build whatever we want out of bulk. Wish they would do this with the mindstorm stuff too!

OLS

[Ambiguous Coward]

So, what Lego needs to do now is publish the OLS, or Open Lego Standard. Seriously, when it becomes obvious you're going to lose the battle, maybe it's time to embrace the alternative? Instead of fighting to keep your ideas out of the hands of others, fight to make sure that *everyone* uses your idea. It makes your assets valuable in a different way. This way, they'll still have control over the standard, and if products meet the standard, they get branded with "OLS Compliant!" and consumers know that if they buy "OLS Compliant!" parts, they'll work with their other "OLS Compliant!" parts, which makes consumers very happy, which makes the standard valuable.

-G

Re:English translation

[OwnedByTwoCats]

Lego is unable to retain its trademark

• on the shape of the blocks

(or, in particular, the red, 2x4 block). So it sounds like others will be able to make compatible blocks.

Had Lego lost their trademark on the Lego name, that would have been much worse.

brand name = quality

[smellsofbikes]

I have mixed feelings about this. I have 38 years' worth and hundreds of thousands of LEGO bricks, which cost an enormous amount, and it'd sure be nice to get vats of cheap bricks so I can build some of the things I want. (I'm halfway through making a 3-D printer using chocolate, that has a working space of about 9 cubic feet, and boy does that take a lot of blocks.)

But at the same time, companies will rush into the space formed by LEGO losing their trademark, build cheap bricks, outcompete LEGO, LEGO will go out of business, and then we'll be stuck with lots of cheap imitators who aren't making the beautiful stuff LEGO created, and that could end up destroying exactly what makes LEGO worthwhile.

There is a value to having a single entity driving a market -- a planned economy in miniature.

Re:brand name = quality

[zappepcs]

Perhaps, but that economy was built on the quality and diversity of product, not simple market forces. It's kind of like Walmart. They have all the stuff that people normally buy, or most of it, and at cheap prices. When you want something that people don't normally buy, you have to shop somewhere else. So, yes, that drives the price up, but also creates special products.

I have concerns about imitators diluting the value of the market that Lego has built, to the point that it is no longer viable to create the special parts that Lego does create. I'm not talking about flag poles for ships or castles. Rather I'm talking more of the technic line of parts. If you want active models or robots etc. you need special parts, not just blocks. For example: to build a car Lego provides many wheels/tires/tank treads, Ackerman steerage, differential gearing, shock absorbers etc. The Lego gear-motors are awesome. Lego provides gears, axles, chains, even flex-shafts, worm-gears and housings, pneumatics, .... In fact, blocks are good, but to make really awesome geeky stuff you need all those special parts. I hope this does not mean an end to the specialty parts.

It would truly be the end of an era if those specialty parts go out of production.

Re:English translation

[gregbot9000]

Well, I'm surprised they were able to have anything like that this long. They have been around 50 years, any patent should have ran out years ago. Interesting they would try to trademark the block, which doesn't run out, good thing it didn't work, for the consumer at least.

I see Lego announcing a change in which country it resides in, to one more favorable towards corporations in trademark laws. That or outsourcing few plants to China to stay competitive.

And whats with all the toy stories and polls? Is /. gearing up for some big holiday push?

Re:End of legoes

[moderatorrater]

Why not? Any company that wants to compete with them will still have to turn a profit, which means that they won't be able to drive Lego out of business unless Lego's simply less competitive. It'll be decades before the word "Lego" is no longer synonymous with building blocks that snap together. Further, they retain the rights to the "Lego" name, just not to the blocks themselves, so they'll still have a ridiculous amount of mindshare. If you're going to release buildable models, do you want to release them under the name of "Lego", or do you want to release them under the name "FunBlocks!"?

This is a huge blow to Lego, but it shouldn't be deadly by any stretch of the imagination.

Re:makes sense, meh

[ChaosDiscord]

The Lego plastic is actually superior, and the quality of the molds must be better, too.

So why is it a mixed blessing? If Lego's products are better, they'll win on quality and be worth the price. Or perhaps the general public doesn't value the difference, in which case the public gets what it wants. This is capitalism working well: competition, with competitors competing on quality and price and consumers having options.

Re:makes sense, meh

[gfxguy]

It's a mixed blessing because of exactly what you point out...

I think people will go for low prices, and before they realize it was a mistake, Lego will already be out of business. You'll say the customers have chosen (they have), but even most of them will realize they chose wrongly only after it was too late.

Re:makes sense, meh

[Colonel Korn]

The Lego plastic is actually superior, and the quality of the molds must be better, too.

So why is it a mixed blessing? If Lego's products are better, they'll win on quality and be worth the price. Or perhaps the general public doesn't value the difference, in which case the public gets what it wants. This is capitalism working well: competition, with competitors competing on quality and price and consumers having options.

Quality doesn't win in this market. You can win on marketing, but not on quality. This ruling means there will soon be lead-tainted Lego-compatible pieces made in a certain Asian country and sold mostly through Walmart. Yeah, they'll break, discolor, and not fit together all that well, but they'll be significantly cheaper than genuine Legos, because Lego can't get away with paying its employees $2500 a year. And these new parts will soon outsell Lego. Now Lego does have a good marketing position, given their great brand recognition, and they'll make a lot more money per part. This will slowly erode, however, until Lego branded parts are a either niche market for elitist liberals who buy their groceries at farmers markets, or it will go away entirely.

Just so you know.

Re:makes sense, meh

[snaz555]

It's definitely a race to the bottom, because most parents have no clue what they buy their kids. The #1 goal of buying something is to shut the kid up. The #2 goal is to surprise the kid with a gift. And a $10 CrapKit will do either just as well as a $50 quality one. Toys are considered disposable. And the kid has no clue about concepts like quality and functionality - as long as it looks the part. (Brand recognition is a factor.) The kid will play with the CrapKit, find it difficult to proceed beyond the basics, and will likely grow tired of it because of its limitations. The parent will observe that the hotly desired toy stops being played with after a few days or weeks and pats themselves on the back for being cheap and wonders why anyone would buy the expensive version. They leave this to the people with more money than sense. It's a self-reinforcing spiral, simply because the average person is average intelligence, which means if you even bring up the subject of developing intelligence they'll look at you like you're from a different planet. It's just not something that they ever spend a single brain cycle on. Hey, they came out alright... right?

I always played with Legos when I was a kid. Well, to my parents it was playing, to me it was construction projects. As I got older they became ever better planned and thought out, and I'd carefully plan around the parts available. My parents never saw that part. They viewed Lego, I'm sure, as the equivalent of a crayon and a sheet of paper.

By the time I was 10 or so I built things like flexible suspension bridges (suspended with string) that could carry my HO size train set across 3 feet or more, to replicas of buildings I read about. Lego is a fantastic tool for early development of an innate sense of force distribution; in particular how to design for forces to distribute into compression with little pulling (depending on axis) and close to zero twisting. It encourages focusing on difficult problems somewhat beyond the current skill, then learning through failure and developing an innate sense for how to further improve something that a bystander might already be impressed by or think is beyond good enough.

My take on it is that every parent should buy their kid real, quality Lego. Mostly generic blocks. At least give it a try. Because if the kid takes to it - boy are you getting something of real value for dirt cheap!