As a background, there are plenty of chinese lego alternatives, operating mostly legally in the west as the lego patent has expired long ago. Brands such as Mouldking, Cobi, Bluebrixx, CaDa, etc. are available here in Germany even in retail stores and online, and it is perfectly legal to sell "alternative" bricks. Cobi itself manufactures all of its part in the EU (mostly Poland) and creates original designs (mostly War-themed models such as tanks, fighting jets etc. as Lego does not do those).
Fun story: my wife ordered a couple of those "alternate" sets, and none inflicted on Legos patent nor TM (no lego branding, not a copy of a lego set, etc). The Swedish customs acted on their own (baffling to me) and stopped the package, sent her a letter in stark wording to accept forfeit. She challenged this, then Lego's lawyers got in contact with us and, using the figure patent, claimed this was a copy and we should forfeit or they would sue her. Very harsh letter, very stark wording.
Left a very bad taste in my mouth, haven't bought any Lego (or alternatives either) since.
Or are they doing a pharma and have repatented a small variation, or the European equivalent is still going?
Or is it actually trademark that is being enforced here?
[1] https://www.chaillot.com/ip-news/validity-of-3d-trademarks-f...
LEGO is using design marks to protect all new bricks they create. design marks can just be registered without any review. but they can be challenged, and some of these challenges have been successful.
These are the designs registered for Lego A/S on the EU eSearch website: https://euipo.europa.eu/eSearch/#details/owners/154249
I did also see from the daily bulletin, that literally today "Bricklab Holding GmbH" (https://www.northdata.com/BrickLab%20Holding%20GmbH,%20Weinh...) was awarded the registration of a minifigure-like design: https://ibb.co/s96f9sKN
Bulletin for today: https://euipo.europa.eu/copla/bulletin/data/download/ctm/202...
Buying actual Lego bricks produced in whichever Lego factory and reselling them is not counterfeiting.
if you get fake bricks you might not open a support case to get the bricks replaced, but you would complain and report that shop. with enough reports coming in someone would look into that. so i feel that this is unlikely to happen. at the worst case it's someone clueless, mixing in alternative brands by accident. but i expect someone doing that intentionally would be shut down quickly by reputation only. i mean, shops get closed simply because they get to many complaints about taking to long to ship.
Question: do the legit brick manufacturers equal the quality of Lego? I picked up a Lego-compatible set years ago, and it didn't quite fit with Lego blocks (I'm assuming due to poorer tolerances).
I admit I have no knowledge here, but if 100% compatibility is possible, faking the logo doesn't seem like a high bar. If you were buying fake individual bricks (not sets), how would you even know?
producing bricks with a LEGO logo is a low bar. selling them is more difficult. you need to sell a lot of them to make it worth it. in order to sell them at scale on bricklink you would need to target a lot of stores. how would you do that without the storeowners knowing? a single store would not sell enough without being noticed.
Honestly, it was a long time ago, I don't think it would say anything about the quality today. But I think it was MegaBloks.
how would you know? you may never have seen a crappy you-could-tell-it-was-counterfeit with the lego logo, but a high quality copy? that can't be beyond reach of injection molders
> I could also imagine that you can buy china-manufactured parts that carry the lego logo.
It wouldn't gain the manufacturer anything, but cost them in terms of liability. It would also mean they can't sell bricks made with such moulds to any party which very much does not want get into a trademark dispute with the Lego Group. So it is very, very unlikely.
There are plenty of cowboys out there who produce sets which look way too much like Lego sets (boxes and all), and which violate the trademark by having logos which sort of look like the Lego logo if you squint, but bricks with the literal Lego logo on them would blow away any sort of defence based on plausible deniability.
Our eldest daughter loves airliners and wanted a model of a particular type of plane earlier this year that we could only find as a Cobi model. I've always been a bit wary of Lego-alikes (principally because all of the ones that I saw growing up in the 80s and 90s were kind of crappy), but have no complaints with the quality of Cobi models - excellent instructions too. The cost was probably half, or less, of what a Lego equivalent - if there'd been one available - would have been as well.
Cobi's range of aircraft models is much broader than Lego as well so if you have a loved one who's into "Lego" and planes, they're a real winner. We've just bought our daughter another one of their aircraft models for Christmas.
At least there wasn't an horrid chemical smell as when we opened some Chinese figures off Ali-Express (soldier minifigs).
Not being sarcastic, just curious whether there's something special about Lego or whether they're just passing along the restrictions imposed by their payment processor.
The baddies out there are numerous, dedicated, highly adaptable, and willing to throw mass volume at a small % opportunity.
The vendor's money would be "clean" from an outsider's perspective.
AML laws aren't required to make sense in order to be enforced. Their effectiveness is basically zero:
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/25741292.2020.1...
The overall premise is that they order someone who has no real way of knowing if a transaction is a ruse or not to stop doing transactions if they're a ruse. This doesn't work so the entity ordered to do it gets yelled at unless they do a bunch of stuff that negatively impacts innocent people, at which point it still doesn't work but now they've checked their compliance box.
Doesn't look like anybody can make 35% of their revenue from those countries though, does it.
It's really unfortunate that LEGO acquired Bricklink, and then did this, but it's such a common storyline.
Isn't compatibility a huge part of the draw of Lego?
I've never heard of incompatibilities, what are they?
The only problem I've noticed product wise is there are now mold defects after they started adding recycled plastic, only one or two minor (visual surface) imperfections per box, but before, there were none.
Tons of e-ink spilled over it and some never recovered.
Lots of those pieces look like technics, but aren't.
>We don’t currently have the resources to support Marketplace operations in these areas at the same level as everywhere else,” the statement reads
https://www.brickfanatics.com/lego-is-closing-bricklink-in-3...
Israel also feels a little off. I doubt that that's there for the same reason as e.g. Taiwan or Kazakhstan. Or San Marino, that's not there due to war, sanctions, shipping or trademark violations.
It seems like they had a number of reasons to disallow businesses in various countries and now they're blocking them as one big chunk to avoid uncomfortable answers about individual countries.
> We will review this decision regularly, and we hope to be able to reopen the BrickLink Marketplace to LEGO® fans in these countries in the future.
Shutting it down in (almost) the entire South America doesn't feel like it makes financial sense, can't be such a small market that it wouldn't be worth keeping it open.
Is anyone finding relevant political or regulatory patterns in the country list ?
Direct link to the list: https://www.bricklink.com/help.asp?helpID=2687
I don't think LEGO is big in most of those countries (at least not in India), so they might be trying to slow down the secondary market in order to grow sales for new products.
Thankfully there's many good (and compatible) competitors now, that get you much more bang for the buck. I'm not that deep into LEGO(R), but it feels they have already lost a substantial portion of goodwill in the power user community, which may be contagious. I certainly wouldn't buy or recommend it to anyone anymore (except used perhaps).
> Six years ago, I wrote that it was a terrible idea for LEGO to acquire Bricklink and revisiting some of my thoughts I expressed then, it sure seems like there’s some dodgy stuff happening behind the scenes.
> To be fair, I acknowledge that there may be compliance challenges operating in some of these countries, where things like local laws, logistics, import restrictions etc may make it difficult for LEGO/Bricklink to do their business there, but surely there could’ve been a better way to communicate this, or invite community feedback instead of turning the whole site off in 2 weeks.
I agree that Lego owning BrickLink created a big conflict of interests but there doesn't seem to be anything shady about how they acquired it.
I think the secondary market drives sales. People need to believe that the overpriced sets they are purchasing, never open, and stash in the attic will make them a fortune on the secondary market one day.
"We appreciate your understanding, - The BrickLink Team"
Understanding of what? They didn't describe the situation that lead to their decision to unilaterally apply the same treatment to all of these countries.