With more and more alternatives appearing to Lego which also increase in variety and even surpass at times Lego quality, why focus just on this company for a brick building community? I for example have been badly burned by Lego’s handling of the Mindstorms brand and there are more compatibility broken product lines from Lego.
Is posting other brands alright here? Will it lead to unpleasant conflicts from Lego, if their brand name is used?
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Offbrand bricks are just fine. The reason I picked the Lego name is because everyone knows it. So no worries! If you want to make a specific community for offbrand bricks, I’d be glad to pin it!
I think this was the right call, discoverability is just so much better than any recombination of “interlocking building bricks” or something. “Lego” is very close to being a generic category name anyway, in my opinion. As long as the community is as small over here as it is right now, splintering it even further wouldn’t be a wise move, I think.
I dunno, why does everyone blow their nose on a kleenex?
Lego is eponymous for plastic building blocks. If you call the forum anything else, you aren’t going to be recognizable and easy to find.
I mean, hell, there’s people that don’t even know there’s actual brands other than lego at all
Although I am opposed to offbrand and custom bricks, it may help to jumpstart the community’s growth if we begin by allowing them for the time being. There is not currently a rule in this community that addresses offbrands. I think for legal reasons r/Lego did have to specify in their description that they are not affiliated with Lego™️ the company, so this community’s mod(s) may want to add that.
Why are you opposed to offbrand bricks? The way look at it the patents are expired and the purpose of patents is to enable a short term monopoly to create a profit motive for innovation. But after the patents expire then the invention belongs to everyone to build upon.
I dislike 1:1 copies of Lego sets. But copying the bricks is fine with me- and actually a good thing long term I think.
Great summary of the Constitution’s IP clause.
Patens are expired, bricks are fair game to copy.
Sets designs and appearance are copyrighted so for sure copies of sets is piracy.
I prefer only Lego brand bricks. Sometimes I buy bulk bricks for my son at a local used Lego store and there are always a few off brand bricks. I usually remove them and throw them out. They don’t go together as well sometimes, and all the time the colors aren’t quite right. Even if the color does match, the color fades a little and always fades differently on off brand bricks. Just prefer the real thing.
The used Lego store has used bricks in bulks for $6 a pound, and you can pick and choose what pieces you want. For three bucks you can get half a pound of rare, genuine bricks, if you know what you’re looking for. Great value.
To me, especially when it comes to MOCs, it’s like an art form to work within the limitations of what the branded medium provides, or with digital MOCs, what the branded medium could hypothetically provide. Using offbrand or custom pieces to embellish a LEGO structure feel like “cheating” in a way to me, both in the artistic aspect and the engineering aspect. I’m fine if people want to make communities for Megablox for example, or communities for any or all building blocks brands (excepting ones which support plagiarists like Lepin), but a forum for a branded item/medium should be almost entirely built with brand. There’s also what’s called a generic trademark, wherein a mainstay brand’s name becomes a common term for a type of product (ex. “Kleenex” in lieu of “tissue”), that I’d want to avoid since it makes it harder for clear communication among hobbyists and worse for the brand (and in this one case, I generally do like the brand).
Why are you opposed to offbrand bricks? The way I look at it the patents are expired and the purpose of patents is to enable a short term monopoly to create a profit motive for innovation. But after the patents expire then the invention belongs to everyone to build upon.
I dislike 1:1 copies of Lego sets. But copying the bricks is fine with me- and actually a good thing long term I think.
1:1 copies are not fine by me, because it is just straight up product piracy. Very hard so have sympathy for that.
