Lego is expensive. Not everybody has the kind of money to buy brand name Lego. As a Lego 'puritan' I would never give anything but the real thing to kids but if someone were to give my kid a present that is not 'the original' the only words I would use would be 'thank you', after all, who am I to judge someone else's purchasing power.

The plastic they use used to be very good but more recent mixes are actually not all that good, they turn brittle after just a few months outside of the packaging. Especially 1x1's will spontaneously cracked when they have been connected to a stud at the bottom.

Counterfeit blocks aren't really counterfeit either, Lego itself is a counterfeit product, it was an idea taken from a UK company.

If you get a set of megablocks mixed in with LEGO, your kids will regret it over time.

Unless you want to keep two separate organization systems and never cross build, I had to say thank you, write a nice card, and then donate it.

Lego is a company with name and patents. Other products purporting to be "Lego" while not produced by the company named Lego are counterfeit according to EU law.

I understand Lego seems expensive and that might have something to do with the sticker price dictated by the appeal the blocks have to the buyers and also quality control the company has in place to make sure everything is durable and fits perfectly. I have 30 year old blocks and new ones and everything snaps together predictably and tightly. I also haven't noticed any of the bricks get brittle over time. I fully expect my grandchildren to keep playing with the blocks I played with as a child.

The fact that blocks are getting constant use over many, many years makes them actually very cheap compared to other toys that frequently get broken in hours or days and get quickly forgotten. My kids 3 and 5 spend large part of their time playing Lego which makes me not regret the hefty price of the blocks.

The sticker price is bad way of deciding whether the toy is cheap or expensive. Is $1000 toy that will be constant source of enjoyment and creative education over many years (and possibly your grandchildren) an expensive one compared to $30 toy that will offer no educational value, will only make loud repetitive noises and get broken in couple of hours and quickly forgotten? I don't think so.

There are other formats of blocks that are much cheaper and do not purport to be Lego-interchangeable. Just use those if you are concerned with costs.

Most of the legal related points you raise above are demonstrably false.

Nearly all of Lego's patents have expired across the world, and as of today it is perfectly legal for companies to release competing products that are compatible with Lego's interlocking brick system.

There are many manufacturers releasing compatible bricks, most famous of which (at least in the west) is Mega Brands, a Canadian company, known for MegaBloks and Mega Construx. More recently quite a few Chinese companies have popped up such as Lepin and Oxford.

Today, most of Lego's legal battles involve companies stealing the designs of Lego sets (as in, the full set design, brick for brick) and re-releasing them, the primary culprit being Lepin. Oxford primarilly release their own designs and therefore are left alone.

Your quality arguments do hold some merit though, as the design process of both the set and element design that Lego goes through is unmatched. However at least in the quality department, Chinese brands are coming close. They however have the benefit of Lego doing all the design for them in the first place.

EDIT:

Sources: https://boingboing.net/2005/11/17/judge-to-lego-your-p.html https://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/news/lego-loses-... http://curia.europa.eu/juris/liste.jsf?language=en&num=C-48/... https://www.nytimes.com/2005/02/02/business/worldbusiness/bu...

Lego's patents were in about as bad faith as you could possibly find. They stole someone else's idea after obtaining samples, made some improvements and patented the result.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hilary_Fisher_Page

They bought the company later in an attempt to whitewash all this sordid history.

The problem is that they tend to have dimensions that almost match. If I make a wall of bricks, and put a single off-brand brick in it, then suddenly the wall isn't fitting together anymore properly because of that mismatched size. The same goes for all kinds of more complicated constructions.

They're compatible enough so that they can be connected with lego pieces, but incompatible enough so that they shouldn't be connected with lego pieces. So we keep all the off-brand bricks in a separate boxes to avoid intermixing; you make a whole thingy only from lego bricks and a different thingy only from not-lego bricks.

Some b-brands are junk; not worth the price of admission. But I've also seen - and checked - a bunch of really good fakes, especially 'Blox' is so good that it passes almost every test that I can throw at it including aging in sunlight over long term exposure.

the problem is not lego clones but poor quality lego clones. however with the patents for the lego material expired the clones are now of sufficient quality that it is hard to distinguish them from the original.