Kiddicraft, the Company Lego Ripped Off to Make Plastic Bricks (2014) | Hacker News Reader

Kiddicraft, the Company Lego Ripped Off to Make Plastic Bricks (2014)

birthmoviesdeath.com

94 pointsjacquesm33 comments

Kiddicraft was infact a variant of Minibrix[1]. None of these were "big-bang" inventions but rather a series of iterations that resulted in the bricks we have now.

[1] http://www.powerhousemuseum.com/collection/database/?irn=108...

But without one of them hiring enough lawyers to end up looking the inventor, we'd have nothing. Right?

Thank God for patents, without them this invention clearly wouldn't have had the human willpower to do it at all.

But with patents, yay! A few aggressive apes got rich and everyone else got to play with the invention. Capitalism ROCKS.

I wonder if the person who wrote this article understand patents, at all. I don't see any indication of that. He seems to be implying something untoward happened.

EDIT: I didn't see the comments before (they take a while to load) - the first comment on the article sums things up pretty well I think.

Kiddicraft -> Lego -> Infiniminer -> Minecraft

Even if it's just in namesake, the world does have a funny way of coming full-circle.

Also, http://www.lego.com/en-us/minecraft

I'm honestly surprised there's never been any sign of a "Minecraft: Lego Edition" (rather than the physical "Lego: Minecraft Edition"), with mechanics basically identical to Minecraft now except with all the terrain in-game made out of Lego blocks.

There's was Lego universe, but they wanted dong-detection.

http://www.exquisitetweets.com/tweets?eids=SOlZp2L8I8.SOl4Cs...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9639249

> This is a roundabout way of saying "never build an online game for kids / I have no idea how Minecraft hasn't been sued over this yet"

That's the basic problem of the MMO approach, rather than Minecraft's ad hoc and persistent private servers.

Yep that's an awesome feature. I just don't let the young ones play online, but if they want that group experience then the siblings can all play together but not with the public. Pretty cool.

That's funny and sad in equal parts. I worry about just how many different detections you'd need - surely there's more than one "offensive" shape.

Umm... I was going to say something to the effect of how it isn't technically an instance of the halting problem to detect penises in Minecraft, but it's pretty close in the face of a hostile adversary.

Then I remembered that with redstone, to say nothing of command blocks, it really is close to the halting problem. Maybe not quite technically, since the detection program would be running in a context with significantly more resources (halting problem in the strict sense applies to Turing Machines with infinite resources), but it's still close enough to cause you a lot of practical problems, enough to say that it's probably an instance in practice even if not in theory.

What about a bot that logs into the server and observes block placement, then uses image recognition?

The problem is it's 3D. It'd have to check from every angle, or all you achieve is that people get "creative" about arranging layers at different distances that'll line up when you approach it from the right direction.

I've been known to waste some time on a midsized MC server and the solution there was volunteer moderators and a willingness to ban misbehaving users. Watching chat also helps, since the dong-builders are also likely the ones being inappropriate in chat.?

There is, the new Lego Worlds in Early Access. http://store.steampowered.com/app/332310/

At least this is now not an MMO, so all dong-building will happen in people's personal worlds.

There are skin packs that make all the blocks look lego-ish. I don't really get the appeal. Lego with only one kind of block is pretty boring.

Is there any source that Infiniminer is based off Lego?

Except that Minecraft bears only a passing resemblance to Infiniminer, and has always credited its creator anyway.

Incorrect

I like the way we cross domains

Over the years they refined it - the official birth of what is really the modern Lego came in 1958, when they added the hollow tubes on the underside to help with interlocking -, but the design remains taken from Kiddicraft.

Seems like a pretty key fact. The hollow tubes are what makes Lego lock together so nicely.

Even today, what makes Lego superior to their competitors (to the extent that e.g. eBay sellers take pains to guarantee their packs of random bricks contains nothing but genuine Lego...) is that the pieces are manufactured with surprising precision and have a lot of little details that most people aren't even aware of.

E.g. wonder why Lego Technic sets and similar uses a mix of black and grey connecting studs instead of just sticking to one? The grey ones will rotate more easily, so depending on whether you want to lock something in place or enable it to rotate more freely (e.g. wheel, rotor) you'll use different ones. If you look at them up close, this is achieved by tiny little ridges (fractions of a mm tall and fractions of a mm wide) on the black ones. There's also a slit in he black ones, not sure what if anything that makes a difference to.

Most non-Lego bricks lack a lot of those details, and that makes them less flexible to use.

I thought 'no one is going to steal your idea'

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9664174

Patents are territorial. If the English guy did not bother to patent in Denmark (highly unlikely especially at that time) then Lego was perfectly free to use the design and build on it.

Both nations were signatories to Paris convention at the time, although IANAL to tell if that particular product was covered.

Proof that patents aren't everything.

Another reason why patents are irrelevant.

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