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LEGO Opens Suit Against LEPIN


Hapori Tohu

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Through the LEGO Ambassador Network, Jacky Chen of the LCE Team recently shared the following message:

We would like to confirm that the LEGO Group have recently filed civil actions in China against the manufacturer and distributor of LEPIN branded construction toys. Our cases have been accepted by Chinese courts and are now pending for trials. We expect the 1st instance decision to be handed down in approximately one years' time. Please note that LEPIN will not be legally barred from marketing and selling its products while the case is being heard by the courts.

We deeply appreciate and share the LEGO community's concern and frustration about passing-off or imitation of LEGO products. We are committed to do whatever necessary to protect the LEGO brand and products against undue exploitation, and to minimize the risk of consumers being misled via improper use of LEGO Group intellectual property assets.

What do you think of this move? Let us know in the Talkback!

 

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I think it's a good move, but I wonder how serious it really is.

 

Take Transformers, for example. All sorts of companies steal their characters and designs and sell their own versions for heavy pricetags, but Hasbro and Takara never do a thing. I would suspect LEGO to be even bigger than them in terms of sales, so it really makes me wonder why they'd go after what would seemingly be a very small portion of sales.

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I think it's a good move, but I wonder how serious it really is.

 

Take Transformers, for example. All sorts of companies steal their characters and designs and sell their own versions for heavy pricetags, but Hasbro and Takara never do a thing. I would suspect LEGO to be even bigger than them in terms of sales, so it really makes me wonder why they'd go after what would seemingly be a very small portion of sales.

the same reason people in the music industry use bots to get videos that use 2 seconds of a copyrighted song/something that vaguely sounds like a copyrighted song flagged on youtube

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I think it's a good move, but I wonder how serious it really is.

 

Take Transformers, for example. All sorts of companies steal their characters and designs and sell their own versions for heavy pricetags, but Hasbro and Takara never do a thing. I would suspect LEGO to be even bigger than them in terms of sales, so it really makes me wonder why they'd go after what would seemingly be a very small portion of sales.

 

The Lego designers pour their heart and souls into the sets they design (which is also probably an expensive procedure with all the redesigns and audience tests...), and having some clowns come up and to downright steal those designs, and sell them for themselves, 

Lego is not just losing money because Lepin is eating up their clients, Lego's rights are being trampled here.

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I think it's a good move, but I wonder how serious it really is.

 

Take Transformers, for example. All sorts of companies steal their characters and designs and sell their own versions for heavy pricetags, but Hasbro and Takara never do a thing. I would suspect LEGO to be even bigger than them in terms of sales, so it really makes me wonder why they'd go after what would seemingly be a very small portion of sales.

 

The Lego designers pour their heart and souls into the sets they design (which is also probably an expensive procedure with all the redesigns and audience tests...), and having some clowns come up and to downright steal those designs, and sell them for themselves, 

Lego is not just losing money because Lepin is eating up their clients, Lego's rights are being trampled here.

 

You've made an excellent point there about the effort and cost of set design, which I have to agree with.

 

I'm glad LEGO is doing something about its intellectual property rights, especially with how close these forgeries are to real LEGO sets in terms of aesthetics and parts quality. I really do hope LEGO manages to make an example of Lepin, even though similar companies are nowhere near as popular as LEGO is.

 

:tohu:

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I think it's a good move, but I wonder how serious it really is.

 

Take Transformers, for example. All sorts of companies steal their characters and designs and sell their own versions for heavy pricetags, but Hasbro and Takara never do a thing. I would suspect LEGO to be even bigger than them in terms of sales, so it really makes me wonder why they'd go after what would seemingly be a very small portion of sales.

The third party transformers market doesn't actually steal the exact designs that Hasbro sells, though. And they primarily focus on filling gaps in people's collections that Hasbro/Takara have yet to. In contrast, there are actual transformers bootlegs that are created by people stealing figures from Hasbro's factories before they are ever released, and they copying them and selling them on the cheap.

 

That's actually the primary "appeal" of LEPIN's bootlegs. They copy Lego's designs to a tee and then sell them for far less that TLG does. People are even justifying this over on other sites, due to Lego's perceived "price gouging." They apparently haven't considered economics - namely that, in contrast to Lego's Chinese factory, which at least probably pays a passable wage, bootlegs of all sorts keep their prices down via wage slavery and even literal slave labor.

Edited by Zarkan: Master of Storms
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Well good for them.. But um.. What is LEPIN?

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Just type Lepin into Google/Yahoo Images.

Looks like they can't even spell "Star Wars" correctly /s.

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Man I love Star Wnrs.

And Ninjag.

 

I wonder if the people who own lepin actually realize that they're evil, cackling plagiarizers, or wether they're as oblivious as an N-COD.

 

Eh, I think evil's a bit harsh. They copy something popular and turn it over for a profit. Dastardly, maybe, but, y'know.

 

In any case, cool to see Lego filing suit, really hope knock offs will have to, well, knock it off.

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I hope you folks realize this is absolutely meaningless. Even if everything goes in LEGO's favor, China has repeatedly shown that it doesn't care about enforcing copyrights against manufacturers in its jurisdiction.

 

TL;DR Cheap "LEGO" isn't going anywhere

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I hope you folks realize this is absolutely meaningless. Even if everything goes in LEGO's favor, China has repeatedly shown that it doesn't care about enforcing copyrights against manufacturers in its jurisdiction.

 

TL;DR Cheap "LEGO" isn't going anywhere

 

Since I have no knowledge on the subject, would you provide your sources? I'm not saying you're necessarily incorrect, but that's still a big claim. From my point of view, since LEGO is building a manufacturing plant in China and already has a headquarters there, it would be in China's favor to enforce TLG's copyrights. Why support some cheap knockoffs over a worldwide company investing quite a bit of business into their country?

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Because China's still making money off of it. Look at all the unlicensed knock-off Transformer toys. In the miniature business (40k, Warmachine, X-wing stuff), illegal recasters have been going crazy by undercutting retail prices. Miniature makers (Games Workshop, Privateer Press) are some of the most ruthless litigation machines you'll ever see, but even they know to leave China alone. Finally, take the completely illegal and unlicensed World of Warcraft theme park in China - despite the enormous popularity of Blizzard games (Hearthstone, Warcraft, World of Warcraft, StarCraft, etc.) in the region, the government has decided A) that the local economy gains too much to shut it down and B) Blizzard doesn't want to lose Chinese business. Just Google unlicensed Warcraft theme park, or knock-off F-150, or "counterfeit consumer goods" on Wikipedia. There's a quote about how there are public protests when officials crackdown on counterfeiters because its on the whims of "bourgeois puppets of foreigners". I should note that I'm certainly no expert, but I think it's clear that even really big companies (Activision Blizzard, Games Workshop, Ford) are unable/unwilling to deal with the Chinese counterfeiting problem.

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The best move lego could do, I´m from Mexico and I warned them (in 2008) via Custommer Service of an immpitator of the Lego Bionicle sets (some trowbots and roboriders designed ones, lihkan and kikanalo, nidhiki, toa norik and toa iruili, all the toa inika and some glatorian) technic (some racers and technic big sets), wich still in the market for almost two years after the report, nw there are other company wich uses the designs of some lego system and the agori, but it still selling since 2013.

 

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Have they opened suit against other counterfeiting outfits from that area? I know it hasn't been done as well (or as quickly) by anyone else, but LEPIN is hardly the only problem.

 

...then again, this news came through the community team, and this is probably the first brand that AFOLs find "close enough" to take seriously.

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really big companies (Activision Blizzard, Games Workshop, Ford) are unable/unwilling to deal with the Chinese counterfeiting problem.

 

Well, I'd say it's a good thing that this big company is now trying.

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"What we see depends mainly on what we look for" -John Lubbock
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ironic: just spotted a LEPIN ad in the sidebar.

That's not irony, that's Google Ads tracking pages you're looking at and putting up ads that match the pages' contents.

 

also that's not what "ironic" means anyways, that'd be a coincidence if it wasn't google

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