The story is pretty well known on the german internet.
More info (in german, but deepl/google do pretty decent job at translating): https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Panke#Kontroverse_mit_L...
Uh-huh.
IP law is the cudgel of choice when a company doesn't like what an individual is doing. It's loosey-goosey enough that they can always stir up a somewhat plausible complaint, and they only need a somewhat plausible complaint plus money to make a small person's life a living hell.
Understanding the mechanism does not make it good or right.
Lego is already close to losing their trademark, they can’t let anything like this slide without risking their IP.
So yes, the metaphor in the parent is faulty in that small detail when it picks up the metaphor created in the grandparent to better explain what is going on.
Only one company can hold that trademark, Lego currently holds it, so if his trademark claim had succeeded, Lego would have lost theirs.
can you give any citation for that? Because i can find zero sources for that claim. Sources for the conflict around the logo design are ample, see his filing for the logo (1) and the one from the corporation (2). I can find no filing for your claim about the name in the official database and no media reports supporting it anywhere, only that in 2013, years before the first conflict with the corporation, his brand was already established as "Held der Steine".(3)
1: https://register.dpma.de/DPMAregister/marke/register/3020182... 2: https://register.dpma.de/DPMAregister/marke/registerHABM?AKZ... 3: https://www.welt.de/regionales/frankfurt/article121164920/Ve...
> if his trademark claim had succeeded, Lego would have lost theirs.
no. The marks would be seen as reasonably different. As others have noted the corporations ability to sue in similar cases might be reduced if they create a history of tolerating such "reasonably different" marks, but they would not have lost their design trademark, especially because theirs is a 3D design mark and his was word+logo mark and they are filed for different things. I personally think his mark would have had little to no effect on theirs and he might have had an actual chance of winning in court, albeit a phyrric victory. He cancelled his filing and filed the same name with a different image.
For the whole "invalidating of design patents" there is a far more interesting case that has nothing to do with him: Delta Sport Handelskontor GmbH vs LEGO A/S where the former tried to have EU design patent 001664368-0006 invalidated so they can print and sell the exact same plastic piece under the PLAYTIVE® brand on the market. They lost in court during appeal.
Lego has a design mark for the silhouette of a 4x2 or 2x2 brick for clothing.
Held der Steine tried to obtain a design mark for the silhouette of a 2x2 brick for clothing for his merchandise.
That’s an obvious conflict.
Lego actually won that case for clothing and merchandise. Only for actual bricks they lost it.
He tried to get a trademark on merchandise for his line of clothing, which conflicted with that.
It would probably be like, if a company uses an apple symbol with their company name on a logo. There are by the way many apple juice producers which use an apple symbol in their logos...
This is a myth
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2013/11/trademark-law-does-not...
The real answer is 'it depends,' there is no pat hard and fast answer about the obligation to enforce a trademark. Also it becomes more ambiguous because trademark cancellation proceedings are quite expensive in terms of time and legal fees. You can do a lot of naughty things and get away with it if the prospect of fighting you in a cancellation proceeding becomes too daunting and expensive. The possible workaround is to get a declaratory judgment invalidating the trademark but that is not necessarily something achievable in most situations.
[citation needed]
Other trademark owners aren't asshats like this about their marks and haven't lost them, have they?
Yes you need to enforce your trademark. But not against reviews of your very products, even if those reviews make their authors money through YT ads.
[Add.: and not in this way. I've read up a bit more, and they had a "valid" problem in that he used "LEGO" to refer to plastic brick systems in general. They do need to enforce that so the term doesn't become generic. But they could've just sent a message or letter first.]
(The "using LEGO as generic label" one was a separate instance and did cause the guy to remake a bunch of videos.)
The same goes for something like Lego, just because people commonly call similar plastic bricks "lego" doesn't mean that they'll get away with it if they open a store to sell those bricks.
That ship sailed years ago.
Maybe someone ought to tell Google.
Well, LMGTFY has been a thing for as long as I can remember, but it's not a new search engine, it's just a way to snarkily direct people asking questions to Google for their answers. It's also not critical of the Google brand (and although the URL doesn't have the Google name in it, the website title does), so who knows if Google would find more issue with it if it was.
But the 'store' isn't like your offbrand Google is it? It's actually probably closer to LMGTFY. They sell Legos and other blocks... and when you buy the other blocks they aren't actually called Legos.
See:
On top of my disappointment, they criticized me for having written "Legos" and told me that their products should be called Lego bricks or Lego toys... great way to give an elementary-aged boy a poor impression of Lego's customer relations.
Seems like this may have been a thing only in the US?
It never results in what the big brand wants, some have even gone bankrupt on the wake of it.
Over all it’s more a capitalism thing though. Companies simply become inherently evil entities when they reach a certain size, and on the odd chance they don’t that is not the norm.
We’ve sort of solved it here in Denmark, by having co-operative ownerships where the profits all go back into the companies, which tends to keep their investor based competition in check, but there is no competition to Lego.