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There is a Frankfurt-based toy store owner who has been very vocal on Youtube about the quality and value problems in recent Lego sets. Lego has sued him multip

• solarkraft 5y ago
  AFAIK the lawsuits were mostly about him using "Lego" as a part of his brand (Legoheld). He had to rebrand and now exclusively uses the generic term "Klemmbaustein" (press-fit brick) instead of the name Lego and also now mainly promotes other brands. The story is pretty well known on the german internet.
  • undersuit 5y ago
    Trademarks seem kinda abusive in a language like German with a tendency to make compound words. Farwell Lego Hero.
  • bierjunge 5y ago
    You recall it wrong, his brand is "Held der Steine Inh. Thomas Panke" (hero of the bricks, owner Thomas Panke) and his old logo contained a 4x2 brick, but without "LEGO" marks anywhere. LEGO claimed it could be confused with their bricks. More info (in german, but deepl/google do pretty decent job at translating): https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Panke#Kontroverse_mit_Lego https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Panke#Kontroverse_mit_L...
    • Semaphor 5y ago
      According to the wikipedia link, both of you are correct. One was about his own brand, the other was about him using "Lego" to refer to the bricks of other brands (which he only started doing after they sued the first time).
      • rjzzleep 5y ago
        In Germany that's very common though. Basically small is called lego, big is called duplo. No matter who it's from. It's kinda how people I google things, no matter whether you search on duckduckgo or google.
        • svnt 5y ago
          Yeah that’s probably why Lego sued. If they don’t take action to prevent that they can lose their protection of the term.
        • avar 5y ago
          It's also common to say "just google things", but I'm fairly sure (and the domain is even free!) that if I buy justgooglethings.com and setup my own search engine there that Google will find issue with that sooner than later. The same goes for something like Lego, just because people commonly call similar plastic bricks "lego" doesn't mean that they'll get away with it if they open a store to sell those bricks.
          • indigochill 5y ago
            > if I buy justgooglethings.com and setup my own search engine there that Google will find issue with that sooner than later. Well, LMGTFY has been a thing for as long as I can remember, but it's not a new search engine, it's just a way to snarkily direct people asking questions to Google for their answers. It's also not critical of the Google brand (and although the URL doesn't have the Google name in it, the website title does), so who knows if Google would find more issue with it if it was.
            • easrng 5y ago
              It actually is a search engine now. (It uses Google Search via https://programmablesearchengine.google.com/about/ https://programmablesearchengine.google.com/about/)
          • squarefoot 5y ago
    • mountainb 5y ago
      Lego's legal team uses every possible angle under every possible IP registration method and in every major jurisdiction. They are similar to Apple in this regard. Their attitude is one of maximum aggression down every possible avenue of attack. No defendant is too small, no infringement too petty.
      • dhosek 5y ago
        Trademarks are in a weird place for IP law. They don't expire like copyrights or patents, but failure to defend them can cause the trademark to be invalidated, so if a trademark holder doesn't engage in this sort of behavior, they could end up losing all rights to the trademark. From the outside it seems like bullying and aggressive behavior, but for better or for worse, that's how things are set up.
        • jjoonathan 5y ago
          "It's not our fault that we're assholes, it's just that being an asshole is to our advantage!" Uh-huh. IP law is the cudgel of choice when a company doesn't like what an individual is doing. It's loosey-goosey enough that they can always stir up a somewhat plausible complaint, and they only need a somewhat plausible complaint plus money to make a small person's life a living hell. Understanding the mechanism does not make it good or right.
          • kuschku 5y ago
            If you tried to call yourself Applehero, made videos about electronics, tried to trademark that term and sell merchandise with it, with a logo referencing Apple’s apple... well, you’d end up sued as well. Lego is already close to losing their trademark, they can’t let anything like this slide without risking their IP.
            • nitrogen 5y ago
              A 4x2 press-fit brick is more like using a rounded rectangle in a phone repair shop logo, not "Apple" itself.
    • jacquesm 5y ago
      Lego is a great toy produced by a very shitty company with a long history of fraud and legal aggression. All the way back to day #1 when they ripped off the Kiddiecraft toy, packaging and marketing materials and passed them off as their own.
      • Nition 5y ago
        I was just going to ask, how does Lego possibly have a claim on the brick design when they ripped that design directly from Kiddicraft?
        • jacquesm 5y ago
          They tried to whitewash their crime by acquiring Kiddiecraft long after they ripped them off and HP committed suicide. Essentially they have already been told they have no patent on the bricks so this is just scare tactics. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lego_clone https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lego_clone
          • trulyme 5y ago
            HP == Hilary Page, Kiddiecraft founder and inventor of Self-Locking Building Bricks. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hilary_Page https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hilary_Page
  • jkepler 5y ago
    When I was a kid and full of enthusiasm for Legos, I bought a very small pirate set---a rowboat, a canon, a pirate and a soldier---with money I'd earned, because my friend had a larger set with the canon, and it fired a piece via a spring mechanism. To my great disappointment, Lego had changed the design and the canon wasn't functional. I wrote them a letter (pen and paper, back before the Internet), and when they replied it was legal-speak about liability concerns if the small piece ended up in someone's eye. On top of my disappointment, they criticized me for having written "Legos" and told me that their products should be called Lego bricks or Lego toys... great way to give an elementary-aged boy a poor impression of Lego's customer relations.
    • AltorX 5y ago
      Wow, are you me? I had exactly the same frustration for that specific cannon after seeing a friend's shoot across the room. I wrote them a letter also, my parents helped me, and I included the "defective" cannon in the envelope. They sent me it back with the same reasons (safety concerns). Hah!
    • trulyme 5y ago
      Your use of word "Legos" in the first sentence is pure gold. :)
    • jacobolus 5y ago
      Up to about 1990 pirate legos had shooting cannons. Then there were a few years in the early 1990s where the cannons had the necessary plastic parts to fire cannonballs, but you had to first disassemble them and add your own ballpoint pen spring. I’m not sure when they switched to non-shooting cannons. From a web search it seems like they have since switched back to shooting cannons.
      • yAak 5y ago
        Amusingly, the resulting pen-spring cannons I made were much more powerful and “dangerous!”
      • Aeolun 5y ago
  • liversage 5y ago
    In Denmark there's Galleri Lego (an art gallery) named after the owner Louise Lego. LEGO sued her but the lawsuit went all the way to high court where she won the right to use the name. Presumably people don't easily confuse art with toys. http://www.louiselego.dk/ http://www.louiselego.dk/
    • moksly 5y ago
      We have a long and proud history of big brands suing the little guy over names in Denmark. It never results in what the big brand wants, some have even gone bankrupt on the wake of it. Over all it’s more a capitalism thing though. Companies simply become inherently evil entities when they reach a certain size, and on the odd chance they don’t that is not the norm. We’ve sort of solved it here in Denmark, by having co-operative ownerships where the profits all go back into the companies, which tends to keep their investor based competition in check, but there is no competition to Lego.
• fifilura 5y ago
  Mentioning the Streisand effect. I would claim that the original post had the same but still opposite effect on me. Now i really want an AT-AT set! Edit: oops the price tag.
  • wongarsu 5y ago
    > Now i really want an AT-AT set! > Edit: oops the price tag. That's a fairly good summary of the state of LEGO. Add what some call slipping quality or simply cheaping out, while the competition is rapidly catching up in quality for lego-compatible brick models (and in some ways surpassing LEGO), and you have a perfect storm.
    • collinmanderson 5y ago
      I've heard there are places where you can rent sets, which makes it more cost effective.
    • tpmx 5y ago
      So when you say "competition" you mean these various crappy Chinese companies that create sets by copying almost every single LEGO brick in existence, right?
      • mcphage 5y ago
        As well as make their own sets, and then sell those sets for 25-30% of the price, at 95-90% of the quality.
        • tpmx 5y ago
          More like 30% of the price at 60% of the quality (and that's generous).
          • mcphage 5y ago
            Maybe you haven’t purchased them recently, but the quality is much higher than 60%.
• rndgermandude 5y ago
  This youtube guy had me at "Die saufen Lack, ich kanns mir nicht anders erklären".
  • Semaphor 5y ago
    "Lack saufen", or "chugging varnish" is a common German (internet?) saying for people who are just crazy.
    • deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
    • chopin 5y ago
      I am a pretty old German and heard it for the first time. But it made me smile.
    • tremon 5y ago
      The closest English equivalent then might be sniffing glue (intentional) or maybe huffing paint (unintentional)?
• hazelnut 5y ago
  He’s getting paid by the competitor. His comments are amusing but take it with a grain of salt. His opinion is paid.
  • lqet 5y ago
    Do you have a source for that?
  • chki 5y ago
    How do you know that his opinion is paid?
  • golemotron 5y ago
    What if someone is paid for an opinion they already have?
    • wpietri 5y ago
      That is a very present question when looking at a lot of think tanks and whatnot. Personally, I'd say it undermines my trust in a few ways. The broadest is undue weight: if some kinds of opinions are being paid for and others aren't, we're going to hear more of the paid-for opinions. But it also creates more direct incentives to a) say what might be rewarded, and b) once on the gravy train, say what one's sponsors like to keep getting rewarded. And worst, I think, is that money distorts cognition. As Sinclair wrote, "It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it." So for me, any conflict of interest like that undermines the offered opinion. It's somewhere between hard and impossible to know how much influence is involved.
    • ragazzina 5y ago
      I had a disagreement with a famous (in my country) snowboarder on the internet about this topic. He goes on secondhand gear and beginners snowboarding forums and suggests boards by the brand that sponsors him. I told him he should at least put on a disclaimer on his comments explaining he is paid. His reply was that he chose the sponsor because he likes the product. I still think it's immoral.
    • 5y ago
• rickstanley 5y ago
  If anyone is wondering the title of the video is: "700€?? Ernsthaft, LEGO®? Die bunte Pest : Star Wars 75252 UCS Star wars Destroyer Devastator"
• AtlasBarfed 5y ago
  It's a bad time to cut quality. Lego has never really had serious contenders in its decades of existence, but the Chinese knockoffs are getting pretty good from what I can tell. They are producing knockoff sets for 1/3 of the cost, and the quality is reaching lego-levels. And this isn't low profit margin. Lego has gotten the Chinese to raid several of these guys (Lepin) and it didn't slow them at all. The real gauntlet just got thrown down recently. Remember the UCS Millenium Falcon? Well a MOC builder made a UCS but with an interior model of the Falcon as well. Guess where you can buy that? Well, NOT Lego, and I think that's a problem in Lego management. With the internet there should be FAR MORE Lego-provided sets. Sure, have the Harry Potters and Star Wars sets. But we are talking about a company that (granted to very good tolerances) is charging a LOT for very cheap plastic. They should be exploiting far more of the long tail. Why can't I buy from Lego a complete set of old-school Classic Space? Or Castle? Why do sets go "out of print"? They are leaving money on the table, and the Chinese/Malaysian/etc companies will happily fill the void. From what I can tell, the fake Lego industry has already structured itself into a somewhat legal resistant form. The base legos are manufactured by one set of companies, which they can do 100% legally. Those companies sell the blocks to the companies that produce the knockoff sets. If you raid those companies, well fine they lose some stock and they just setup somewhere else with the exact same sourcing.
  • rootusrootus 5y ago
    1000% agree. My wife is into Lego creator/expert sets, in particular buildings. So I typically buy her a new one at least twice a year, for her birthday and Christmas. I'm having to work harder now to find sets she hasn't already built, and having to pay more because they're out of production already and Lego isn't building new ones too often. I accidentally bought a Chinese knock-off set, and it was surprisingly good. The brick quality was totally comparable to Lego. The part that was lacking was the build methodology -- it was damn near impossible to build successfully the way the instructions said. But there's more variety in the knock-off sets, more accessories like lighting and such, they cost half as much (and probably still have a ridiculous margin). Lego should be worried, and they should step up their game. Becoming known for collectibility seems to be their strategy right now, but it is going to make people like me look elsewhere.
• slightwinder 5y ago
  That guy is kinda entertaining, but you shouldn't take him too serious. His complaints are often not much fact-based and very one-sided. He is quite infamous for this. And let's not start talking about his political rants... If you really care about the little bricks, you should also watch other channels to get a more rounded picture.
  • DemocracyFTW 5y ago
    That kind is quite entertaining and you should take him serious. His complaints are as a rule fact-based as he has sets he discusses right in front of him to show and tell. He does highlight what there is to highlight in the products of the involved companies. He is widely famous for this. Since you refuse to talk about his political rants, I will not get started on those either as I have never seen a clip with a political rant from him. Definitely watch his channel (https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=held+der+steine https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=held+der+steine top result), also observe he gets quoted quite a bit and has collaborations with other people interested in similar things.
• dyingkneepad 5y ago
  I had a lot of legos when I was a child. I kept them and gave them to my son a few years ago. They still mostly work just fine. I also bought new legos for my son, and the quality in the newer pieces is degrading at an alarming rate. A few pieces got too lose and simply don't connect anymore. Some arms from minifigures are extremely loose and will soon not be able to maintain a pose. None of my old legos are loose like that in the arm, although some traditional pieces are indeed barely sticking. Things are getting to the point where some of the newer pieces are already in worse quality than pieces I bought in 1992 and used for years and years. I'm sad, I don't think his son will be able to inherit his legos.
  • seized 5y ago
    Haven't spent a lot of money on Lego sets over the last two years, that hasn't been my experience at all. Every piece has been high quality. It's the old pieces from mine and my wife's youth that are cracking and breaking, which isn't unexpected.
  • ggm 5y ago
    I am only here for fellow pluralism fail fanatics to say the plural of lego is Lego.
• bschne 5y ago
  Wait, is that what that set is supposed to look like? The cacophony of colors makes it look almost like it was built from a random bin of parts lying around.
  • drainyard 5y ago
    They do that to make it easier to find the bricks, make it more interesting to look at while building and because they likely produce more bricks in those basic colors (last one may be outdated).
  • meibo 5y ago
    Yes, this is common in modern sets. Quite a few have the color puke shining through, even if it's fully assembled, which is a common complaint.
• mosselman 5y ago
  I should have heeded the warning. I wasted too much time already. Very fun to see someone go off on a Lego set like this. Rightly so I must add.
• panzi 5y ago
  Did they sue or was it "just" an Abmahnung?