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Comment by runxel | Hacker News Reader

This is really bad news...

I'm sorry for Bricklink, may you rest in peace!

Maybe it's LEGO attempt to clutch at any straw and they finally trying to be better, but I really doubt it. LEGO has moved themself into a position where they are really cornered. No innovation, fat price tags on everything... – There is a German guy who had a LEGO store in Frankfurt, called "Held der Steine" (hero of the bricks). His YouTube account is quite popular and became a meme in Germany. LEGO sued him for having something which somehow resembled a LEGO brick in his logo. On his channel he reviewes all the "new" stuff LEGO is putting on the market; and he's showing how desastrous the Danish company became. They simply don't care anymore at all as it seems.

Now he's also presenting all the Chinese stuff as well – they are actually ahead in the game already.

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NBA is doing this to themselves too. They keep banning these amazing youtube channels that put up 10min highlight reels within minutes of the game ending. These videos are getting millions of views and instead of hiring them the NBA has been legally harassing them for years and the biggest one announced this week he's finally shutting down for good.

There's plenty of other examples of this in the NBA itself (with their half-baked streaming options) which I'm sure exists in most other sports.

One big one is they should have a library of every game ever for a subscription fee or individual access fee - it's pretty much impossible besides bittorrent or DailyMotion to find old classic games online (even from 2012 playoff finals).

They are all just throwing money into a dumpster fire by trying to live in the past generation of media.

This is just like how we all had to wait for a decade to get decent websites from every major retail-facing corporation, instead of a non-interactive static glorified contact form website. I expect it will take another decade for the big media companies to get proper leadership.

I suspect it's ESPN and their ilk that pay a very hefty premium for the rights to distribute similar highlight reals. Why watch highly-opinionated fluff content when you can get the goods straight from youtube?

On the other hand, the NFL does a good job of making highlights available on their own site very fast, and there are a lot of youtubers using NFL film access to do in-depth breakdowns of players and games.

> LEGO sued him for having something which somehow resembled a LEGO brick in his logo.

Not true. They did not sue him, they just informed him nicely. Also, he in fact had a logo newly registrated for his businss which was resembling an old trademark of lego. This was not about his youtube-channel but his attempt to make a serious business of it. So this was just problem between two companies making money, totally normal and AFAIK demanded by law.

That guy was just spinniung tales and profiting on this to push his own business by playing the poor victim of a hobby-channel.

> Also, he in fact had a logo newly registrated for his businss which was resembling an old trademark of lego.

So they decide to piss him off over such a triviality? That's a terrible decision; if the guy's an enthusiast with an audience, you try to put him on a payroll and go full market fanfare for you; making him change his logo and pissing him off in the process has zero opportunities to increase profit for LEGO in any way and lots of ways to backfire.

Mixed blessing. There was - and is - plenty wrong with Bricklink. The guy who bought it wasn't nearly as nice as the guy that started it (who died in a car crash, his mom then sold it).

Woah I had no idea. I've been speaking bricklink's praise for a long time. Very sad to discover this!

Could you explain, for someone outside the AFoL community, what the downside to this acquisition is? What do people fear will change? What kind of innovation are fans looking for that Lego isn’t providing?

I’m also particularly curious what you mean about Chinese products – what have they been innovating in where Billund has been stagnant? I confess my only familiarity there has been in trying to separate knock-offs from genuine out-of-production sets on eBay.

> what have they been innovating in where Billund has been stagnant?

The quality / price ratio. Chinese knockoffs are 90% of the quality for 25% of the price.

> 90% of the quality

Hm, are they? I haven't actually tried recent Chinese knockoffs specifically, but historically, "almost as good as Lego" is pretty disappointing. That last mile (last micrometer?) has always set Lego apart.

In my experience, yes. I’ve purchased a few sets and have been pleased.

Care to name the brand?

I have purchased Lepin. I think they're not selling under that brand anymore, I think they sell as King / Queen / Jack? Also for technic sets, I have heard that Decool is even better than Lepin, although they don't seem to have the largest technic sets. You can get them off of AliExpress, or via private sellers at r/lepin.

Maybe I'm out of touch with current lego prices, but the prices on the Lepin webstore look very high for what I expected. $70 for a small house? Isn't that about the same as lego?

Lepin doesn't have a webstore. There are a lot of webstores that claim that they're Lepin, but afaik they're all 3rd party resellers.

They are far from 90% of the quality. The production standards at Lego are decades ahead of anything a Chinese company has produced so far in terms of tolerances, durability and quality control.

> They are far from 90% of the quality.

I don’t know what to tell you, besides that they were for me.

Really? A friend of mine has a house full of the Lepin kits and they look indistinguishable to me. Apparently there's very occasionally a piece which doesn't snap tightly enough and needs a bit of glue or something, but then I have an official Lego kit (little VW convertible thing) on my shelf which falls apart if nudged too hard so Lego's not perfect either.

As usual, you are both right. There are terrible knockoffs and there are the ones that even people very well versed in all things Lego have a hard time telling from the original when just given two otherwise identical bricks.

I love Lego's products, and have decades of fond memories with them, but every interaction I've ever had with the company itself has been kind of disappointing in terms of quality of service. I hope that's not a bad sign for BrickLink.

> fat price tags on everything

Prices have been about the same at 10c/brick or lower for pretty much forever. It's more that kits are getting more detailed than ever.

Analysis of the lawsuit here: https://www.reddit.com/r/lego/comments/ai7rub/lego_germany_s...

Why is this bad news? The article has pretty positive spin.

LEGO's finally been realizing that they should target adults over the last several years, and have been seemingly successful. I know more adults with recent LEGO sets now than ever.

I was cautiously optimistic until they said unequivocally that they'll be stopping all sales of BrickArms and other fan-made/third-party accessories. (And moralizing about not supporting "warfare and violence" while continuing to sell Lego Indiana Jones sets with rifle-toting Nazis.)

This is probably going to kill BrickArms. Most of their sales are through BrickLink.

https://www.brothers-brick.com/2019/11/26/news-the-lego-grou...

Stopping sales of BrickArms is a no-brainer. IIRC firearms are notoriously difficult to reproduce as models, both physically and digitally, due to the aggressive IP lawyering of manufacturers.

Also I don't think LEGO wants to be in the business of selling models of actual named firearms. I think there is a massive divide between selling models of real life firearms versus models of firearms from films/entertainment IP. Context matters a lot.

> Stopping sales of BrickArms is a no-brainer. IIRC firearms are notoriously difficult to reproduce as models, both physically and digitally, due to the aggressive IP lawyering of manufacturers.

Change the names to something generic. Problem solved. It's worked for dozens of popular video games, and BrickArms are much lower-detail even than those.

When Lego's stance was "we don't make violent toys, period," that was something I could respect even if it wasn't my preference. Now their stance is "we don't make violent toys unless they're more than 100 years old or from the future or from Indiana Jones," and it's impossible to take that as anything but empty moralizing. They have, again, made sets with Nazi soldiers and recognizably modern firearms. For them to now say they won't endorse "guns and things that are potentially particularly connected to things like warfare and violence" rings utterly hollow.

Companies have to sue for trademark infringement or they will lose the trademark due to the precedent of trademark violations going unchallenged.

They'll probably patent the whole site to be able to sue competitive sites.

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