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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.
Lego was naar het Europese Hof van justitie gestapt in de strijd tegen de Canadese concurrent Mega Brands, die een blokje op de markt heeft gebracht dat past op die van Lego. Het Hof oordeelde vandaag dat het ontwerp van Lego niet is beschermd door het Europees merkenrecht en dat er dus geen sprake mag zijn van alleenrecht.
Can't really argue with that....
This guy's the limit!
http://www.dw-world.de/dw/article/0,2144,3784225,00.html The news is not that generic blocks didn't previously exist. It's that Lego is unable to retain the trademark.
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.
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!
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.
Great, time to open source Lego! ... err... not sure how, but it sounds great in theory!
There are 10 kinds of people in the world... those who understand binary and those who don't.
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.
Nostalgia's not what it used to be.
Lego tried an end-run around the law.
Copyright couldn't cover their bricks.
Patents ran out eons ago.
But Trademarks, Trademarks are perpetual... so they 'Trademark' a physical object instead of a name & logo. anybody wonder why they lost?
If true, hopefully this will open doors for people interested in inexpensive bulk purchase of bricks of specific sizes and colors.
I thought you could already do that.
One of our competitors trademarked the term "hypothesis". From now on, we will call them "boneheaded ideas".
I was a lego boy when I grew up. I had a lot of legos.
I also had some imitation blocked made by Tyco. These immitation blocks never fit together well. You'd build something and it would fall apart. Although the bricks looked almost identical, the Tyco bricks just sucked.
So, I do worry about imitation blocks. Lego blocks are the best because they have impossibly high standards during manufacturing in order to avoid the frustration I experienced with the Tyco blocks.
If someone else is going to start really making sets to compete with Lego, let's hope they go the distance and implement quality control like Lego does.
- It's not the Macs I hate. It's Digg users. -
I for one am looking forward to the explosion of availability of cheap melamine and lead-laced lego-like blocks for young toddlers.
Mmmm, mmmm! Nothing says safe, wholesome and tasty like cheap imports from third-world sweat-shops.
After Hilary Page commited suicide, LEGO purchased the expired patents from Page's estate so they could pretend they invented them in the first place.
LEGO did invent and patent the little tube on the bottom of the brick, which wasn't in Page's original design, which allows for more connection possibilities. Once that patent expired, other companies, such as Canada's MEGA, (creator of Mega Bloks) created clones. LEGO, of course, sued for trademark infringement. In the US, they lost, because you can't trademark and patent the same things - functional elements, which are covered by patents, can't be trademarked. Other countries treat this issue differently, hence LEGO enjoys some trademark protection even for the purely functional elements.
Apparently, LEGO's view is that a patent should be valid as long as the company holding the patent continues to manufacture the product, and tends to be pretty aggressive about it. The irony they they effectively violated the patents of the original inventor is completely lost on them.
Posting anonymously because I've had previous run-ins with LEGO's lawyers.
Finally, I knew all this Dutch my parents learned me would pay off! This had better give me some free karma.
Lego loses it's unique right to make Lego blocks
Luxemburg - It'll be hard to swallow for the Danish manufacturer Lego now that the European Court of Justice has decided Wednesday that everyone can make a block that fits the original legoblock.
Lego had gone to the European Court of Justice battling against the Canadian competitor Mega Brands, who has brought a block on the market that fits Lego's. The Court ruled today that the design of Lego is not protected by European trademark and that there can be no such thing as an unique right.
The Lego block was invented in 1932 by Ole Kirk Christiansen in the Danish city Billund. The name LEGO is derived from the Danish words "LE GOdt" (play good). Later the word appeared the word could be interpreted in Latin as "I gather" (or 'I choose' or 'I read').
LEGO is a Danish toy manufacturer that became famous because of the colored plastic blocks. The blocks are sold under the name "Lego"; that way they refer not only to the manufacturer, but it also became a generic brand. The manufacturer is the biggest toy manufacturer in Europe with a revenue of 7823 billion Danish Krone ( 1049 billion Euro or 1337 billion dollars ) in 2006. Meanwhile, LEGO has won the price "Toy of the Century" twice.
The LEGO Group is the fifth biggest toy manufacturer in the world.
As long as there are slaughterhouses, there will be battlefields.
Fitted? Really?
Made for children, by children.
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Flat or tall?
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Lego hasn't had a monopoly on the bricks for decades. (They have a monopoly on making bricks that actually work, but that's not for legal reasons, that's just because their competitors are incompetent.)
Lego has used a red 2x4 Lego brick in advertisements, and they believed that this particular brick could be used as a trademarked "logo". The European Department of Justice decided that the brick picture is too generic to be trademarked. The decision will be appealed.
So all it means is that competitors are allowed to put that particular brick in their advertisements and on their boxes. They already had the right to produce the brick.
Finally! A year of moderation! Ready for 2019?
Following their pattern of Wait & BadlyCopy, Microsoft will announce the need for the strategic purchase of Mega so they can Embrace the Blocks, Extend, and Extinguish Lego!
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
http://www.mocpages.com/moc.php/18382
Probably won't help with the pirates. Real pirates!
Makin' money, makin' friends, makin' whoopee and wearin' Depends
My shot at it:
Lego was near hot European Hasselhoff just in time to gestate in the stride generator concurrent with the Canada geese Mega Brands, ...okay, I give up...
I've always had respect for Lego. I feel like their prices are high because they refuse to take the cheap-ass manufacturing shortcuts (like production in a 3rd world country). They sacrifice price for quality, and I find that admirable. Not to mention the fact that they are providing jobs within their own country.
It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.
They don't make a small enough brick.
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
Fixed it:
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mod me funny
Personally, I hated megablocks, because the bricks are not made with the same quality as Legos. Legos have a very exacting standard they make for each brick, to guarentee they fit together and stay together when you want to, and come apart when you need them to. Megablocks I found are looser, and don't stay together as often. I'm anal. I played with Legos when I was young, but when I grew up, my son and I put together some megablocks sets he got from someone else. The comparative quality was very poor.
However, in terms of business, a competition between Megablocks and Legos is a good thing. Legos wants (I hope) to be a higher quality toy, while Megablocks is for those who are less anal and more frugal. They have carved out their own niches and provide choice for the consumer. Additional players in the market should help.
At the same time, I hope someone tackles with the idea that lego sets are too specialized now. There are so many specialty pieces that it limits the amount you can create with a single set, and limits the replay value. Back in the 80s, there were tons of new pieces that weren't all just bricks, but those pieces could still be creatively used to build new models from your imagination. The odd shaped clear plastic panel that curls around the model just so and only has one real use is annoying.
"All great wisdom is contained in .signature files"
Yeah, on the one hand, the race to the bottom wins again.
On the other hand, Lego is a socially responsible company with zero waste, excellent pay and bennies for all employees, and an all around good company. I hope this doesn't mean the collapse of the Danish economy. I mean, they pretty much have Legos, Bang and Olfsen, Hans Christian Anderson... and that's about it.
We use the mega blocks and duplo blocks, both. There both okay for pretending.
However, I've found that both I and my kids cannot easily take legos apart. In addition, the form factor of legos makes it easy to make their intended toy (if you want to spend the time), but comparatively hard to make other things.
I remember the days of American Bricks, though, when we'd make marble machines, spaceships (tiny, med, large, and super), ships, and whatnot. Yeah, it didn't have all the specialized parts that lego has. But that's what imagination is for. I remember playing the Children's Space Revolution (in 1972, with a theme song that was remarkably similar to that which came out for Star Wars), and other stories that we made up as we went.
I never saw that with legos -- not with my brothers, not with my oldest son. We gave it up. The kids do pretend with Mega Bloks. As a parent, I'd much prefer something that falls apart every so often, to something that you can't get apart without tremendous effort.
Correct Horse Battery Staple: 72 bits of entropy. Enter "Correct H" into google. When it generates the phrase, that's
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.
Now anyone can produce their product... ...and it's highly unlikely Lego will survive.
I'm having trouble reconciling that statement. It's essentially the mantra chanted by lobbyists for many "protected" industries, like for example the pharmaceutical industry. Funnily enough, anyone can make and sell acetylsalicylic acid (aspirin) nowadays, and Bayer is still in business. There are plenty of denim pant manufacturers, and Levi's is still in business. I simply don't buy the "protect me" argument. Oh sure, they each make less money than in a monopoly situation, but they all still make money.
In a truly free market, if Lego Group has grown so inefficient that it can't compete, then it DESERVES to go bankrupt. The REAL free market rewards efficiency - in production, marketing and distribution. Tampering with the free market in any way allows inefficiencies to creep in. These inefficiencies incur a hidden cost for all of us, since resources are tied up that could have been used by society elsewhere.
However I guess the US has forgotten what a free market is. Just looking at the headlines is a daily reminder. Enjoy your United Socialist States of America, and continue to "protect" as much as you can... me, I live in a country that protects very little by law - but allows me a great deal of personal freedom.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
Quoting Black Cardinal, above:
So, yes, there's a good chance it would be :-)
The problem is, Lego might be a household name, indeed in some countries it is a generic name for building blocks, but it is still a family-owned business. It's CEO and Chairman is a cool-looking grandson of the founder, and it resides in a rural town in Denmark called Billund, with a population of about 27,000 where nearly 90% of its manufacturing still occurs. The town is almost entirely dependent on Lego.
Lego is among the world's best employers (if not outright best). Equal opportunity in action. Employees, including the CEO, do not have reserved parking spots at the HQ's carpark, offices mostly resemble community areas rather than walled rooms, free food and drinks are all over the place, not to mention some of the best sporting and health facilities provided to employees. Blue collar workers receive the same treatment, for most things from gym membership to access to the health clinic, there is no difference between the executives and simple manufacturing employee. People don't wear name tags, they nearly always wear casual, unless they have a meeting with an outside party.
Lego has Idea Labs where people just experiment with new toys. It employs scientist, from chemists to child psychologists just to carry out all sorts of experiments. It is such a fun place, you'd be forgiven if you thought you where in Wonderland. It has a museum full of toys that it invented but failed to manufacture, mostly due to safety concerns. I can understand why some of them might have been thought of as dangerous, but boy are they cool!
Of course, with all the above, with the cost of employing and manufacturing in Europe, it can't compete with the cheapest-of-the-cheap Chinese factory which just mass produces plastic blocks. I understand that in this case, IP laws do not really cover its business, and anyone is legally able to copy them, but IMO it's rather sad to see that such companies can't really exist in this world, that consumers don't value the history and the culture of a company. They just look at a price tag and make their decision solely based on that.
Everyone I met at Lego is aware of these issues. They have carried massive restructuring plans since 2005, but they know they can't compete against most rivals whose costs are simply lower; yet they really want to preserve the unique culture that has made Lego, Lego for the past generations. Short of outsourcing manufacturing to some place in China, closing its museum and laboratory and airport and with it the town and becoming just another plastic manufacturer, I can't think of a way for them to survive. As I said, it's rather sad.
--
Here's the translated page. And no, BabelFish did not produce a translation of the same quality.
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From the perspective of a man who grew up with legos and duplos- The legos were waaaaaay easier to snort.
FOXTROT UNIFORM CHARLIE KILO
You forgot the red-light districts.
Not that I've ever been there. Nope. Uh huh. Nyet. I'm just a Puritan American and have no clue what "red light" means. Yep.
FOX NEWS.com should be BANNED from television and internet. Have the Congress take it over and give us Truespeak.
OK, I don't speak Dutch, but...
The competing companies will even benefit from free advertising since Lego company advertising will effectively promote companies that simply call their product Legos.
Is the decision about the *shape* of the toys, or the *name* of the toys?
My son had LEGO blocks, but I soon discovered that they have sharp
pointy edges, and hurt when you step on them barefooted in the dark.
Needless to say, any block I encountered in the dark disappeared. Soon
he had none. That never did teach him to pick up his toys. Grrrrr.
Option 1 doesn't look feasible - you can't get better economies of scale than the market leader easily. Option 2, from the comments in the last story about this, seems to already be happening. All this does is strengthen the Lego brand - they are the people who make bricks that actually stick together and don't cause toy structures to collapse. Option 3 is also a possibility, but what can you sell more of by selling cheap construction bricks?
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Yeah... I look at this as a mixed blessing.
I have a substantial collection of Lego, and I have a single MegaBlocks model... as much as I hate to say it, there's really a difference in quality. The Lego plastic is actually superior, and the quality of the molds must be better, too.
So while I'd like to be able to buy bulk packs of pieces (which I've done via bricklink for some years now) at cheap prices (at an average approaching $0.10 piece for a little piece of molded plastic?), I certainly wouldn't accept lower quality just to get cheaper pieces.
I'm all for competition, though. If Lego reduces prices (I know they whine they are barely making it... which is just baffling to me), then I'll be all over it. I mean, go ahead and charge $50 for a 400 piece Star Wars set... but let me buy bulk bricks to build my mega (no pun intended) structures, and I'll be a happy guy.
Sometimes on bricklink you can find pieces you like for less than a penny a piece... unfortunately, while I admit I don't look very often, I haven't seen that kind of deal in some time.
Stupid sexy Flanders.
Although Lego is still a danish company, I believe they moved all their production operations from Billund, Denmark and the US into the Czech Republic and Mexico back in 2006... So for what it's worth, maybe not China, but Czech republic and Mexico aren't known as hot-spots of eco-consciousness either...
Pfft. Look through any sizable collection of legos belonging to someone under, say, age 8.
Give me a nickle for every brick with teeth marks on it.
Lego are utterly fantastic at making their bricks. They're mind-bogglingly good, in fact. To work properly, Lego bricks must be made to a tolerance of one micron, otherwise models would fall apart or the bricks be too hard to separate. Those little plastic bricks are as precisely engineered as the most precisely engineered components in the most expensive Swiss watch. They've been making them exactly the right size since the 1960s - the bricks you or you parents had in the 60s will still work perfectly with the bricks they make today.
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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.
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According to one interview I read somewhere, the most expensive Lego parts to manufacture are the mini-figs. I believe they cost something like a little over $1 US to manufacture.
Lego uses very precise molds. It is the key to the Lego bricks' distinctiveness, and why they fit well. Old molds are destroyed by burying them in the concrete foundation of buildings. They also have several different kinds of plastic to create different specialized bricks and pieces. People can replicate the design of the bricks and sell them cheaper, but I don't think they can replicate the manufacturing process and not be forced to raise prices.
I have yet to read TFA (go figure), but I'm guessing this has something to do with Lego trying to maintain IP protection on their brick design by claiming that their trademarked logo is on the stud, and therefore the idea of a stud is trademarked as well.
"If a nation expects to be ignorant and free in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be."
Uh, I did not know that the Dutch red light district had any competition from the Danish red light district. Unless you mean to have sex with Lego figures, that is.
They're already in one. Lego has been able to keep Mega Blocks from selling in Europe until now via this bogus trademark law, but that was the last holdout. Most countries have already ruled against Lego on this issue.
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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.
Stupid sexy Flanders.
You like Danish cheese? I love Cheese Danish.
Not a Twitter sockpuppet... but I wish I was.
The Lego plastic is actually superior, and the quality of the molds must be better, too.
They were pretty famous for being obsessive about mold quality and tolerances
slashdot article about manufacture:
http://entertainment.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/07/21/1716239
They've only been making them excatly right since 1980.
[i]According to one interview I read somewhere, the most expensive Lego parts to manufacture are the mini-figs. I believe they cost something like a little over $1 US to manufacture.[/i]
I believe it, but it's still mind boggling that, after all this time, despite how precise their molds are, that it costs so much for a molded piece of plastic.
Even if the plastic is super high quality, you're only getting a couple of grams of it.
How long does it take for a high quality mold to require replacement when it's just molding plastic? I don't know.
Still, it seems to me that technological advances should make it cheaper for them to be able to produce those parts... ultimately it's still just molded plastic.
Stupid sexy Flanders.
Just visited a LEGO store at a mall in San Jose. They have a wall of Lego piece dispensers all individually filled with unique common Lego pieces. You can grab a cup for 7 bucks, or a bigger one for 14 bucks, and fill it up with as much pieces as you can fit. Definitely beats bricklink. check it out!
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.
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I have one of those stores here (in GA), and it's actually very conveniently located for me...
I go there all the time, but there's only a few dozen types of pieces at a time, and those ROUND cups they have make it difficult to effectively use the space in them.
But I have bought pieces there plenty of times... but it surely doesn't beat bricklink when I want black or white or even gray 2x4 bricks and all they have is pink or purple 2x2 and 2x3, some fence pieces I don't want... the small car plates (but no wheels)...
But they rotate inventory in and so I do go there occasionally.
Stupid sexy Flanders.
He as a guy who values quality over price(or quantity if you want) sees this as a mixed blessing since people would probably care more for quantity. That would make Lego lower their prices which might lead to a diminish in the quality of the work.
Usually when something is produced by many companies in big numbers marketing starts to take over and quality is most of the times compromised for flashiness or ease of use and other idiot friendly things.
An example that comes to mind is digital cameras. Most cameras these days have more megapixels than they can handle and most parameters are automatic which in IMHO is retarded. It's really hard to find a camera that lets you set the focus and exposure as you like. Instead they have features like print directly from the camera, post on hi5 or something like that... That happening to Lego would make it a joke and destroy one of the only toys that actually educates children instead of dumbing them down (or brainwashing if you want to be more extreme).
PS: Before you start flaming me about the camera example, I am OK with having an automatic focus/exposure/etc. But not including a slider that lets you select 1/100 seems stupid since it's a simple UI element and if you can program an automatic system for the focus you should be able to make it manual. Also, when I said "more megapixels than they can handle" I was talking about the noise that appears because the CCD is just too small for the resolution they are cramming on it. There is a proven limit on the resolution that depends on the lens size and CCD size and as far as I can tell most cameras exceed the limit.
ics
I totally agree. We recently "polluted" my son's Lego collection with MegaBlocks, and after several tearful episodes ("They won't stick together!" "They don't fit!") have decided to root this evil from our house. They're a scourge.
Once a week my son goes and plays at my parents house for a few hours. The Brio trains from when I was a kid still work great, but the cheap knock off add on parts my parents bought to have more for him are crap... they had to find an affordable retailer online to get more stuff. As he's moving past the real little kid blocks and into Duplo, the fact that everything from my childhood held up is remarkable.
However, just about everything that we buy on the market at this point, is cheap and crappy. It's gotten to the point that we just buy whatever is cheapest at Walmart, because trying to get the higher end stuff isn't higher end, just more expensive. Why pay twice as much for the same falling apart plastic junk from the same factories in China? After churning through $100+ car seats, we not just get the $40 ones at Walmart, and when they go, we replace them. I have two kids, 18 months apart, and just about none of the stuff gets handed down because EVERYTHING on the market is poorly made.
It's easy to blame consumers, but a lot is a function of smaller family sizes. The generation born in the 70s was born when average family sizes were over 2.5 kids, so 2-3 was normal, and plenty of families of 4-5 existed. Family sizes for middle class families (the ones that buy this stuff) are probably under 1.5 right now... If most of your customers won't have a second kid, why would they pay more for quality, it's not getting passed down.
America just isn't child friendly anymore... and we have fewer kids in each family... can't put 3 kids in a normal sized sedan, need either a giant sedan, SUV, or minivan with a third kid, and kids under 13 aren't supposed to ride up front... WTF? The sedan was the quintessential family car... now a mom running small carpool with 4 kids in her car needs a minivan because you can't put one up front and 3 in the back, something that was routine for us growing up as kids.
Alex
Source? Sorry, no one in their right mind will believe this without more data than some random /.'er claiming it. I mean, sure, there's a tolerance, and according to LEGO company (Warning: PDF, see page 18) it's "as small as 2um" (twice a loose tolerance as your claim.) To me, the "as small as" bit means "no smaller than, and often larger than" so please share why you think it's always twice as accurate as LEGO claims it sometimes is.
everything in moderation
they make good quality legos too. I was waxing nostalgic last year and bought a generic bin of legos at kmart or something, it wasn't lego brand but looked identical, and they held together like crap.
I remember taking my 2x8 blocks and seeing how far I could get them to extend horizontally while stacked, and could get over 50 sometimes. The crappy new ones were lucky to see 10.
I also made things that required proper tolerance. I made a working lego lock. Tried to make one with the new blocks but they kept catching on each other. crap I say. Pay the money and get the real Lego.
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
The problem is when you buy a set of Legos most of the premium you pay isn't going for superior build quality, it's going for licensing because you're getting "Harry Potter" or "Star Wars" wrapped up in the deal, but don't worry they're nice enough to spread the cost to all their lines.
You also have to deal with the politics of Lego. No modern weapons, no Nazis for Indiana Jones to foil. I love my Legos, and the build quality is superior, but there are plenty of other reasons to shop Megablocks.
"That would make Lego lower their prices which might lead to a diminish in the quality of the work."
It may but it doesn't have to. After all, the basic blocks haven't changed for probably 50 years. It can't cost much to make plastic blocks from standard dies.
The new stuff, sure. And if Walmart carries legos, they will squeeze them anyway, competition or no.
If you want some Nazis or guns to go with your Legos here you go. From what I've seen very quality build work too. Enjoy!
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
Though one could argue that in this case, you can make informed shopping of quality bricks. So I guess, this is not directly what the linked article relates to, but more like expensive big iron main frame computers, which most people don't actually need, so most people don't actually pay for it.
I'm just a Puritan American and have no clue what "red light" means.
There are a lot a drivers around here like that.
Ooh, a sarcasm detector. Oh, that's a real useful invention.
For your modern weapon LEGO needs, I would check out this site: http://www.brickarms.com/Toys/Weapons.aspx
They claim it's made from the same plastic as real LEGOs, but I haven't used them. Anyways they seem pretty cool.
They also happen to make Nazi figurines for your enjoyment: http://www.brickarms.com/Toys/Minifigs.aspx
According to one interview I read somewhere, the most expensive Lego parts to manufacture are the mini-figs. I believe they cost something like a little over $1 US to manufacture.
I seriously doubt that. They'd be selling them at a loss otherwise.
http://shop.lego.com/
Oh man!
Years on slashdot and finally something to show for it!
True, they have quite a few elements there and in quite a few colors. However, they nowhere near all the common elements listed, and there are no bulk purchases. Sure, you can by a 1x1 yellow plate for about 10 cents. That is a pretty good deal if you need a single plate. But if you need 500 or 1000 such plates it is still about 10 cents a plates. That is not such a good deal. Sadly, they used to have some bulk packs with reasonable per-element prices. Those have all gone away.
LEGO does not understand how to market to Americans.
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!
Carlsberg?
We don't believe in radical loony monotheistic religions from the middle east -- we're Christians.
I remember going through the Great MegaBlocks Purge as a child. My brother and I had each received a fairly neat looking set for the holidays, but were quickly disappointed with not only the quality of the plastic, but the inability of the block to properly fit with Legos, let alone themselves. Our parents contacted MegaBlocks with these concerns and they made it up to us by sending us a ton more of their product. Well, eventually my brother and I decided to go through our tubs and tubs of blocks and sort out all of the MegaBlocks so as to be cast aside. There was much rejoicing in Lego Land.
"He who can destroy a thing, controls a thing." --Paul Atreides, Dune
Probably too late for a proper reply. An old roommate of mine used to occasionally make dies. Like anything in manufacturing, pick two of three: accurate, hard-wearing, cheap. For high-speed production you need to make especially costly dies; even a cheap die for something the size of one Lego brick would set you back several hundred dollars, and you couldn't expect to use a very dense/high-quality plastic with it (due to injection pressures), nor expect it to last much beyond a few dozen or scores of casts for any sort of reasonable accuracy. I suppose for very high tolerances, sharp narrow edges (which Lego have), high speed, and hard plastics you would be paying many thousands (or more?) for the die; the costs grow enormously if you want a die for large pieces, i.e., more than a few square cm. And you would have to replace the die fairly often. The cost of the plastic is trivial compared to the capital cost of the die.
As for technological advances... well, there's only so much you can do to make tooling steel better; basically, it is a materials-science question, and the advances there are not quick. For instance, except for CAD/CAM there have not been significant advances in tooling that would help in the manufacture of the die, that I know of, for probably the last 50 years.
The problem is also that, since Lego has been the only game in town for many years, the average Joe will think that everything that fits Lego blocks *is* made by Lego even if it really is a cheap knockoff. That will dilute the Lego brand itself, which is probably one of the things Lego wanted to avoid by taking these guys to court.
Too bad, so sad. I don't know European trademark law, but in the US, the Lego trademark is not the actual bits of the brick that make it compatible with the other bricks. That's functional anyway, so trademarks would never protect it. You'd want patents instead, and they are no longer available in this case. Using the functional parts of the brick in a dilutive way is perfectly okay. Now, when they use the word LEGO in some fashion, since that's actually a trademark, then we can begin to discuss dilution. Although saying "LEGO-compatible" is a nominative use, so that's also okay, if it's true.
Incidentally, what you were describing is actually customer confusion, which goes to trademark infringement; dilution is when there is no confusion, which is why it's kind of bullshit.
-- This and all my posts are in the public domain. I am a lawyer. I am not your lawyer, and this is not legal advice.
I was going to mod this funny... but I rather share the joke with others...
Go ahead and read parent post with the voice of Comic Book Guy.
Fantastic!
Ubuntu is an African word meaning 'I can't configure Debian'