7 ms·

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 "Klemmbaust

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
        I seem to recall that the problem with "just google things" or LMGTFY is that if "google" becomes a verb (to google) it can't be trademarked once it becomes of common use. That's the reason many companies often issue official statements discouraging the use of their names as verbs when they see them used as such. I think Google themselves did this many years 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.

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
      I seem to recall that the problem with "just google things" or LMGTFY is that if "google" becomes a verb (to google) it can't be trademarked once it becomes of common use. That's the reason many companies often issue official statements discouraging the use of their names as verbs when they see them used as such. I think Google themselves did this many years 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.