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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.
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
Their may be a grammatical error, misspeling, or evn a typo in this post.
Lego is unable to retain its trademark
(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.
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.
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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.
"I zero-index my hamsters" - Willtor (147206)
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!