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Comment by bierjunge | Hacker News Reader

You recall it wrong, his brand is "Held der Steine Inh. Thomas Panke" (hero of the bricks, owner Thomas Panke) and his old logo contained a 4x2 brick, but without "LEGO" marks anywhere. LEGO claimed it could be confused with their bricks.

More info (in german, but deepl/google do pretty decent job at translating): https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Panke#Kontroverse_mit_L...

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Lego's legal team uses every possible angle under every possible IP registration method and in every major jurisdiction. They are similar to Apple in this regard. Their attitude is one of maximum aggression down every possible avenue of attack. No defendant is too small, no infringement too petty.

Trademarks are in a weird place for IP law. They don't expire like copyrights or patents, but failure to defend them can cause the trademark to be invalidated, so if a trademark holder doesn't engage in this sort of behavior, they could end up losing all rights to the trademark. From the outside it seems like bullying and aggressive behavior, but for better or for worse, that's how things are set up.

"It's not our fault that we're assholes, it's just that being an asshole is to our advantage!"

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.

If you tried to call yourself Applehero, made videos about electronics, tried to trademark that term and sell merchandise with it, with a logo referencing Apple’s apple... well, you’d end up sued as well.

Lego is already close to losing their trademark, they can’t let anything like this slide without risking their IP.

A 4x2 press-fit brick is more like using a rounded rectangle in a phone repair shop logo, not "Apple" itself.

for the uninitiated: rounded rectangles as a shape for phones is an apple design patent, they sued samsung for that

A patent is for products not for logos

Yes design patents are different from trademarks and the apple rounded rectangle phone design is a US design patent while the 2x2 lego brick is registered in the EU as a 3d trademark. Filing for a trademark on a shop name and logo may not be as easily challenged with only an existing design patent and no matching trademark.

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.

They have one for their charger shapes as well among many other things.

First, he called himself Legoheld and then he tried to trademark that name and his logo, specifically an image trademark for any visualization containing a 4x2 or 2x2 brick.

Only one company can hold that trademark, Lego currently holds it, so if his trademark claim had succeeded, Lego would have lost theirs.

> he called himself Legoheld and then he tried to trademark that name

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.

> especially because theirs is a 3D design mark and his was word+logo mark and they are filed for different things

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.

This is wrong, he called himself Held der Steine. To suggest that because a solitary small time shop owner uses a fully generic image of a toy brick will cause the mighty Lego brand to get lost is bizarre. To be sure Lego does not have a copyright, trademark or patent on generic click-to-fit toy bricks and this has been ascertained by a high German court after one decade of strenuous litigation. Lego acts as though they had won that case but the didn't.

> To be sure Lego does not have a copyright, trademark or patent on generic click-to-fit toy bricks and this has been ascertained by a high German court after one decade of strenuous litigation

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.

He has never called himself "Legoheld"! He had a Logo with a structure similar to a lego brick on it. You can google the image...

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...

But apple juice manufacturers are (in the general case) not in the "we manufacture and/or sell electronic products". At which point they would probably end up in an interesting legal tangle.

Your attempt to paraphrase comes across as snide and insincere. It also would seem to indicate that you didn't comprehend the point being made regarding the current framework of trademark law and enforcement within which companies must operate.

Don't hate the player hate the game.

> if a trademark holder doesn't engage in this sort of behavior, they could end up losing all rights to the trademark

[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.]

Iirc the argument bind this would be along then lines oft precendes. I.e., you didn't defend your TM against person A so why are you sueing person B.

I wasn't implying a choice in who to enforce it against. I'm saying there's a wide spectrum what to try to enforce against. LEGO here even tried to enforce their trademark because the logo "looked like a LEGO brick". Apparently that didn't fly.

(The "using LEGO as generic label" one was a separate instance and did cause the guy to remake a bunch of videos.)

> failure to defend them can cause the trademark to be invalidated

This is a myth

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2013/11/trademark-law-does-not...

Read the Lanham Act instead of a blog post https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/lanham_act

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.

According to the wikipedia link, both of you are correct. One was about his own brand, the other was about him using "Lego" to refer to the bricks of other brands (which he only started doing after they sued the first time).

In Germany that's very common though. Basically small is called lego, big is called duplo. No matter who it's from. It's kinda how people I google things, no matter whether you search on duckduckgo or google.

Yeah that’s probably why Lego sued. If they don’t take action to prevent that they can lose their protection of the term.

It's also common to say "just google things", but I'm fairly sure (and the domain is even free!) that if I buy justgooglethings.com and setup my own search engine there that Google will find issue with that sooner than later.

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.

> if I buy justgooglethings.com and setup my own search engine there that Google will find issue with that sooner than later.

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.

It actually is a search engine now. (It uses Google Search via https://programmablesearchengine.google.com/about/)

I seem to recall that the problem with "just google things" or LMGTFY is that if "google" becomes a verb (to google) it can't be trademarked once it becomes of common use. That's the reason many companies often issue official statements discouraging the use of their names as verbs when they see them used as such. I think Google themselves did this many years ago.

> if "google" becomes a verb (to google) it can't be trademarked once it becomes of common use.

That ship sailed years ago.

Maybe someone ought to tell Google.

>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.

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.

Lego is a great toy produced by a very shitty company with a long history of fraud and legal aggression. All the way back to day #1 when they ripped off the Kiddiecraft toy, packaging and marketing materials and passed them off as their own.

I was just going to ask, how does Lego possibly have a claim on the brick design when they ripped that design directly from Kiddicraft?

They tried to whitewash their crime by acquiring Kiddiecraft long after they ripped them off and HP committed suicide. Essentially they have already been told they have no patent on the bricks so this is just scare tactics.

See:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lego_clone

HP == Hilary Page, Kiddiecraft founder and inventor of Self-Locking Building Bricks.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hilary_Page

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