The story is pretty well known on the german internet.
More info (in german, but deepl/google do pretty decent job at translating): https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Panke#Kontroverse_mit_L...
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.
Lego is already close to losing their trademark, they can’t let anything like this slide without risking their IP.
So yes, the metaphor in the parent is faulty in that small detail when it picks up the metaphor created in the grandparent to better explain what is going on.
Only one company can hold that trademark, Lego currently holds it, so if his trademark claim had succeeded, Lego would have lost theirs.
can you give any citation for that? Because i can find zero sources for that claim. Sources for the conflict around the logo design are ample, see his filing for the logo (1) and the one from the corporation (2). I can find no filing for your claim about the name in the official database and no media reports supporting it anywhere, only that in 2013, years before the first conflict with the corporation, his brand was already established as "Held der Steine".(3)
1: https://register.dpma.de/DPMAregister/marke/register/3020182... 2: https://register.dpma.de/DPMAregister/marke/registerHABM?AKZ... 3: https://www.welt.de/regionales/frankfurt/article121164920/Ve...
> if his trademark claim had succeeded, Lego would have lost theirs.
no. The marks would be seen as reasonably different. As others have noted the corporations ability to sue in similar cases might be reduced if they create a history of tolerating such "reasonably different" marks, but they would not have lost their design trademark, especially because theirs is a 3D design mark and his was word+logo mark and they are filed for different things. I personally think his mark would have had little to no effect on theirs and he might have had an actual chance of winning in court, albeit a phyrric victory. He cancelled his filing and filed the same name with a different image.
For the whole "invalidating of design patents" there is a far more interesting case that has nothing to do with him: Delta Sport Handelskontor GmbH vs LEGO A/S where the former tried to have EU design patent 001664368-0006 invalidated so they can print and sell the exact same plastic piece under the PLAYTIVE® brand on the market. They lost in court during appeal.
Lego has a design mark for the silhouette of a 4x2 or 2x2 brick for clothing.
Held der Steine tried to obtain a design mark for the silhouette of a 2x2 brick for clothing for his merchandise.
That’s an obvious conflict.
Lego actually won that case for clothing and merchandise. Only for actual bricks they lost it.
He tried to get a trademark on merchandise for his line of clothing, which conflicted with that.
It would probably be like, if a company uses an apple symbol with their company name on a logo. There are by the way many apple juice producers which use an apple symbol in their logos...
This is a myth
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2013/11/trademark-law-does-not...
The real answer is 'it depends,' there is no pat hard and fast answer about the obligation to enforce a trademark. Also it becomes more ambiguous because trademark cancellation proceedings are quite expensive in terms of time and legal fees. You can do a lot of naughty things and get away with it if the prospect of fighting you in a cancellation proceeding becomes too daunting and expensive. The possible workaround is to get a declaratory judgment invalidating the trademark but that is not necessarily something achievable in most situations.
[citation needed]
Other trademark owners aren't asshats like this about their marks and haven't lost them, have they?
Yes you need to enforce your trademark. But not against reviews of your very products, even if those reviews make their authors money through YT ads.
[Add.: and not in this way. I've read up a bit more, and they had a "valid" problem in that he used "LEGO" to refer to plastic brick systems in general. They do need to enforce that so the term doesn't become generic. But they could've just sent a message or letter first.]
(The "using LEGO as generic label" one was a separate instance and did cause the guy to remake a bunch of videos.)
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.
That ship sailed years ago.
Maybe someone ought to tell Google.
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.
But the 'store' isn't like your offbrand Google is it? It's actually probably closer to LMGTFY. They sell Legos and other blocks... and when you buy the other blocks they aren't actually called Legos.
See:
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.
Seems like this may have been a thing only in the US?
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.
Now i really want an AT-AT set!
Edit: oops the price tag.
Edit: And that looks a good deal more complicated than what I grew up with, wow!
> 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.
This article has a good photo illustrating what we’re talking about.
But then of course other brands took their place, pretty much immediately.
>> Edit: oops the price tag.
> That's a fairly good summary of the state of LEGO.
And it's been the state of LEGO since I was young enough to wait excitedly for the print catalog/magazine to show up so that I could lust over a bunch of Technic and UCS kits my family couldn't possibly afford.
If you really care about the little bricks, you should also watch other channels to get a more rounded picture.
Definitely watch his channel (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.
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.
Lego now has infinitely more models than when I grew up, and they seemingly increase the catalog every year, so this is a very strange criticism. They have Marvel stuff, Friends, Harry Potter, Star Wars, Simpsons, etc etc etc. The number of sets is truly bewildering. Obviously they can't produce everything forever.
Also, they are not selling "cheap plastic" anymore than Netflix is selling "cheap electrons". The plastic bricks are just the medium, the product is the design, the Lego brand, the licensed brand (if any), the whole experience.
One thing they seem to have lost over the years is the flexibility of the kits: I remember many kits having instructions for several alternate models, encouraging you much more to take things apart again after building. Newer kits are mostly a single model and that limits the fun that you end up having with them. The invitation to tinker seems gone.
One fun fact about the instructions, I recently learned from a Lego designer that the reason they use many different colours on the inside of most models is to make it easier to see what's going on while you're building. That explanation never occurred to me, but maybe it's obvious.
I noticed this after buying a crapton of legos on craigslist for, um, my new kid! I do have a new kid, but anyway, the colors vary far too much now.
Charitably, the colors probably subtly act like antialising does in rasterization, so it might make a blocky model seem more organic. But I think the business of selling more sets is also a sneaky reason.
Nowadays there are so many custom pieces and people don’t really rebuild much anyway, so they don’t even need to discourage what you describe using colours.
This is why we can’t have good things sigh
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.
How much does good documentation and designing models costs? You can’t just copy pieces of plastic.
I have a Creality 3D printer. The hardware itself was good. But the tinkering needed to get it working was a lot. All the useful help came from the community. The official support is useless and every time I contacted them they are incapable of telling me if something is in spec, out of spec, or even point me to documentation.
Imagine giving a child a physical toy that you need to consult the internet for instructions because the included ones are incomplete or wrong. Maybe you have a piece missing and the instructions are wrong.
Even if Lego is charging too much, they may have head room. When they feel they are being threatened, they can lower prices and still have the best kits and we’d all flock back.
I agree. This is probably the most difficult part by a good margin for the Chinese companies to effectively copy. The documentation itself was surprisingly good (they basically copied the style of the Lego books), what they don't have are people who are the equal of the 'lego master model builder'. Someone who really knows how to engineer the model both for the final result as well as the process to make it.
Unlike digital copies, molds have a limited lifespan. Making a one-off piece for a set needs to be done in the tens of thousands (or more) or not at all.
Meanwhile, if I understand, they have a program to assemble parts lists and instructions for one offs.
Injection moulds have a finite life, so parts go out of print. Unfortunately their tendency to use set-specific parts causes this to make sets go out of print.
(Obviously they could make another mould, but that commits them to a whole print run to make it economically viable.)
On the other hand, they quote "one moulding machine working for an hour almost equals one LEGO star destroyer", which does explain why they're so expensive.
So he's now selling lego and he's selling stuff from the competition. But he has no more access to the partner exclusive stuff (like lego bags). The only thing you can actually say is that he went all-in on bashing the stuff lego does wrong. I mean, he's living from PR and selling stuff.
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.
If anybody who understands German langauge is up for some great irony from a charismatic toy professional on this topic, you should have a look.
WARNING: You will waste some hours on this.. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V9OKWm_x2RI&t=1504s