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LEGO fight Against Chinese counterfeit LEGO
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Comments
What really surprises me is that Disney has not come after them for the Star Wars IP that is being infringed. LEPIN may not be big enough for LEGO to feel it is worth their effort, but Disney has sent cease-and-desist letters to much smaller targets (like mom-and-pop bakeries making cakes with Disnet character themes), so it would seem that LEPIN would be a perfect target for their legal team.
No way anyone could confuse the two...
It must take them an awful lot longer to scrutinise TLG's artwork, removing such things, than it would to produce their own.
I don't think Brickset has shied from discussing bootlegs. I saw an article dated from 2013 on it. At that time, bootlegs were still mostly of questionable quality. They have caught up quick.
If we put aside the legal aspect of the issue, I think it comes down to whether someone is a Lego fan or a building block fan in general.
But yes, I do agree that since there is a legal issue then that alone should be reason enough to be against counterfeit brands.
(and those Ausini 'minifig' faces gave me nightmares, really painful to look at!)
Another post closer to the to the next page. Thanks @Pitfall69. Put me right off my soup ;)
(One more post closer to the next page.)
One more post closer - at least it wasn't a wart on top of a cyst that had been frozen and then a blood vessel burst underneath. That's what I had to deal with back in my late teens. It stank.
The 'Man Upstairs' will be played by Colin Farrell. The film will be a bit darker... and involve the gritty underworld of clandestine faux-Lego manufacuting.
I don't mean me assembling one copy of a set. I mean someone BrickLinking many copies of an official set and selling them. The Bat-Pod, for instance. If the specific assembly of parts into that set is copyrightable, then would it not be an infringement to buy all the parts from other sets and sell bunches of Bat Pods?
The copycat companies set up their own manufacturing for pieces. They copy art work from the boxes of sets. They use logos/images to cause brand confusion. That is entirely different in my mind.
A lot of the time, that's legal.
Then you're going to get the situation where are an older LEGO piece can be copied legitimately (without even needing to consider Clarkson's Chinese X5 comment), but in the rare colour needed for one of the high-value sets - and you might not even be able to tell the difference because not everything carries a logo.
Those precious sets you've got stored in that temperature controlled vault under the garage might not be worth much more than the box and the manual...
Nor do I think you could stop somebody selling a collection of pieces - and as I said, how many "spares" would you have to add (or omit from the original spare) before it became different.
Instructions? It shouldn't be too difficult to produce an alternative set. A danger is that they may chose to use TLG's PDFs - in which case they're likely to cease being available online
TLG have fought always to protect the bricks - without which a competitor is a bit limited. I don't think they have many other options, except to protect artwork. They've had lots of practice, too - there were half a dozen clones around in the 50s - so it's likely that they've pursued anything they reasonably could.
If someone bought the original Lego printed instructions booklet from ebay and proceed to accumulate non-Lego bricks to build the model, is the action illegal in the eyes of a diehard AFOL?
If a person is selling a kit (set of non-Lego bricks) and expects you to get the original Lego instructions from elsewhere or download from lego.com, is it illegal?
As to people selling a used Lego model and claiming it to be from the original set, he could have built the Lego set and threw away the instructions/box while another person BL all the Lego parts and separately acquired the instructions booklet and box. How can you tell which is lying? And do you even care given both are of genuine Lego bricks?
Where do you draw the line?
Lot's of Lego instructions are available for download. It is TLG's intention that you use these instructions to build sets made with real Lego bricks, but I am sure that is not always the case. Frowned upon? Yes. Illegal? That's another thing.
...And there it it is. My favorite discussion. Do you "own" the set if you "Bricklinked" it? I cannot get into this again :) I am sure is is a bit of a gray area for some, but I imagine if all the parts are the correct parts one might not seem to care.
I was going to say that copying this set will paint a red bull's-eye from Walt Disney Co, which (i) is very touchy about their IP, (ii) has been granted special trademark protection from the China Government.
But then the copycats have been releasing Space Wars / Star Warts , so who knows?
I can think of two more obstacles:
1. If this set is as large as GBHQ, it would cost a lot to ship. (Might cost the same or more!)
2. Sellers may not sell internationally. (Some sellers already do this.)
2. There's always a seller willing to ship internationally.
I guess that in a couple of months this set will be cloned and you can order it for $120,- including shipment, which depending on where you live might give an extra 20% up to 40% for importhandeling costs. I think lego is already happy that the market is still relatively small scale. Imagine the money one could make by importing a full 36ft container with Lepin, bargain a much lower price and sell in facebook groups like you see happening with other very populair goods.
Besides the actions Lego might be taking, i also wonder what bordercheckpoints might consider this to be illegal regardless of the actions Lego itself might undertake.
pretty satisfied with the minifig displays.
also:
batman capes
There is also other forms of harm being done. One of the big problems with clone brands and counterfeits alike, as hard as it might be for us AFOLs to believe, is people buying them thinking they're real LEGO products. Even if they have a totally different logo on them, a person who's less in the know about the building toys market might think all building blocks are LEGO and that "Mega Bloks" or "Oxford" or "Decool" or "Lepin" are just sub-brands.
"Hello, Customer Service? I bought this BELA Ninja Thunder Swordsman set and some of the pieces were deformed or missing." "I'm sorry sir, we don't make that." "What? Yes you do. It's from your budget brand." "No, I'm sorry, sir, we don't HAVE a budget brand." "Well then why does it look the same as in your catalogs?" And so forth. LEGO Customer Service calls like this can cost the company a lot of money regardless of the outcome, but furthermore, the customer will still likely be dissatisfied even if they do eventually come to an understanding that it was their mistake buying a counterfeit product, because they'll still be stuck with a defective counterfeit product rather than a real LEGO set. And that's assuming the customer even goes the extra mile to call LEGO instead of just assuming that LEGO quality control is abysmal and opting to no longer buy LEGO sets.
The real damage to TLG is that there will be people who buy a clone because the original is highly desired but has been retired - and then subsequently choose to buy other sets because their experience and opinion regarding any difference in quality doesn't just the difference in price.
Do clone cheese wedges crack?
I could imagine in a market that has limited access to information about LEGO brands that there could be a lot of confusion about whether any or all of those companies belong to TLG. For all they know they do.
Forget the capital letter. They actually use TLG's font, and as that's trademark infringement, it's a wonder they're not pursued on that basis. Except, of course, that they don't appear to trade directly in the west, and a myopic eastern court is unlikely to uphold a claim, hiding behind it being a foreign language.
Bela don't do anything unexpected, and the Latin name is secondary. What colour would you use? For kids, red and yellow are an obvious choice. Yes, SY use red, but that's all.
I'm not even sure that some of them do it to confuse - stealing artwork just gives them a consistency that somebody else has thought through.
To muddy up the details is a consistent and common form of distraction & obfuscation of facts by the Chinese companies & government. By claiming they are same as Megablocks, you are trying to defend them as legitimate companies by affiliation with true and known companies of much better moral standing. Of which they, the illegal counterfeiters like Lepin, certainly and obviously are not equal to.
Just because the Chinese courts are complicit in their fellow countrymen's illegal endeavors, it's not because they believe them to be righteous, but rather they obviously lack the moral backbone to accept international standards when it comes to legal matters. By calling a spade a spade when it comes to the thieving nature of their citizens. Similar to their belligerent and ridiculous protest against the silly South China Sea issue yesterday.
All this back and forth is fun debate as we parse out small details like "Well even though it's obvious they stole and copied Lego's brand logo, what are they supposed to do when Red is so obviously the color of all children's toys duh! And Latin is the most common font type to use as well of course. ANd never mind the square box shape being used in the same upper left corner that Lego just happens to use, but has no legal ownership over as a true patentable/copyrightable item. Nor does using their exact artwork of the same set constitute deceiving of the customer, because its obviously the easiest way for a company to get consistency across its entire range of counterfeit products to be believable."
I'm excited at the possibility that the world, starting with US first, is facing the facts with China. I hope they can be convinced to change their thieving ways before irreparable harm is caused. Because when words stop working, money is not enough to turn the other way, courts are purposefully blind, ignorant & deaf, then what options are left won't be fun to see. I can't wait for China to get a slap in the face for their misbehaving ways.
I don't give a monkey's whether they're Chinese. I'm against all clones, Chinese or not.
You talk about "illegal theft". The point is that it often isn't illegal. Immoral, yes; illegal no.
THAT is the basis on which we have to go forwards. Everybody wants to express outrage at what the clone companies do. Well, so what - it doesn't get anybody anywhere expressing outrage and claiming something is wrong. It doesn't give any sort of platform for fixing the situation or for moving forward in any way.
Everybody's entitled to their opinions. I believe that the Chinese don't copy everything in the way that they do to deceive; instead I believe they copy absolutely everything because they're lazy f**ks who take the shortest path to making money.
There are some good arguments against what they do. And bad ones. Saying they use the colour red, or use Latin capitals is meaningless and fairly incidental; the person who said that omitted to mention that LEPIN use TLG's own font - something that is a lot more significant and would carry a lot more weight in a western court. We need to pick the right evidence not the flimsiest of connections - because the latter just makes it look like there is no substance to our claims and that we are grasping at straws.
At the end of the day, they're not yet interested in duping the west, essentially because they've got a much bigger home market to conquer first. It's dead easy to sit here and dismiss the Chinese as being nobodies - but don't you think they do exactly the same in reverse? It's not all about the west, especially when you're not in it!
Different cultures have different values. You talk, with contempt, about China's "thieving ways". Most people reading this board, including me, would agree with you. The trouble is that the Chinese don't - they laugh at us and continue to steal our ideas. We have the moral high ground and they get the results. Hmm!
So what do we do? I don't know. What I want to do is get away from the single-minded approach of repeating, over and over and over again, that the Chinese clone manufacturers are nasty, horrible, thieving, cheating entities (which they are), because calling them names achieves exactly NOTHING. We need something a lot better.
But what about the majority of customers - they aren't FANS of anything. They are just buying toys for their kids to play with. How many of them are even going to care if they are buying brand X or brand Y, or are they more concerned about buying something their kids will play with for awhile at a lower price. They don't care if it's compatible, if the quality is as good, etc, etc. Toys (in general) aren't made to last anymore anyway, so they don't care if it will still hold up 10 years down the road. If they get 6-12 months out of it, they are happy.
I'm not condoning ripoff companies like Lepin in any way, just saying that we tend to get a bit too myopic when we discuss these things. Sure, I would never taint my LEGO collection with this stuff, but I also know I (we) are the minority in even caring about such things.