Lego Learns It Doesn't Get A Monopoly On Toy Building Blocks In Canada
from the choices,-choices dept
Lego Group, the makers of the popular building blocks has been in the news quite a bit of late -- often because of their overly aggressive lawyers. These were the lawyers who scolded people for thinking their website was legos.com instead of lego.com, and then told an artist whose middle name actually was Lego, that she couldn't use that name in her artwork. Well, it seems those lawyers have been fighting a much bigger intellectual property battle -- trying desperately to convince the world that no one else should be allowed to build connecting building blocks. Most of the Lego patents ran out by 1988, but then they moved on to trademark law. Apparently they still had at least one patent in Germany, but that got thrown out earlier this year. A Greek court tossed out Lego's attempt to block other building blocks earlier this year, and now the Canadian Supreme Court has dismissed a trademark violation case that Lego had filed against competitor Mega Blok. Was Lego really so afraid of competing that they had to pull out trademark law to stop any competition?
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No surprise
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Re: No surprise
Ah, to go back to the days of basic blocks and lots of imagination...
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Can't you buy just a generic set of building blocks and lego men anymore?
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Re: No surprise
Lego, my Lego(tm)
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Lego
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Why help your customers when you can harass them?
This is just ridiculous to go after every website that you can find that contain the word lego.
Now for the stupidity of Lego.
Number one. Any website that is about Lego is free advertising for Lego.
Number two. A big percentage of these domains are owned by Lego enthusiast, which in turn mean, they are owned by Lego customers who give Lego a great amount of business.
Number there. These are also websites that help other Lego enthusiast in ways that Lego can't and / or chooses not to, thereby relieving Lego of customer support that might otherwise be demanded of Lego.
And these are the people that Lego wants to sue??? It's amazing that a company as large as Lego lacks this much business sense and this much apathy toward the very people ( their customers ) who keep them in business.
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