Okay, Maybe The Lego Folks Aren't Always So Bad

Surprises

from the one-out-of-three dept

Over the last two weeks, we’ve had a couple stories that made Lego look a little too eager to send out lawyers on intellectual property matters. There was the scolding anyone would receive for going to legos.com instead of lego.com, followed up by an attempt to tell an artist she couldn’t use her own name (which yes, was Lego) on her artwork. However, alison writes in to let us know that the folks at Lego aren’t always so bad when it comes to some intellectual property matters: “When Lego executives recently discovered that adult fans of the iconic plastic bricks had hacked one of the company’s new development tools for digital designers, they did a surprising thing: They cheered…” In this case, they probably could have pulled a DMCA-type trick for circumvention or something, but (thankfully) they realized that would be silly. What the hack did in this case might lower the price of certain orders by making them more efficient — but they probably realized just as quickly that those lower prices would mean more people would order the Legos (snicker) necessary to build their creations.