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In lugnet.off-topic.clone-brands, Richard Parsons wrote:
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These sound like MB
Command
Ops (Military) and Dragons (Fantasy) figs to me. I haven’t seen studs on
Bestlock figs’ backs either.
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I want so badly for this not to be true, because it would mean I’ve been
thinking of the wrong minifig this whole time, but I just dug around in my clone
bins and I think you’re right. I’ve got Best-Lock and military sets so
connected in my mind that I forgot that Command Ops was Mega Bloks.
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And I would heartily agree that Command Ops was just made for BrikWars.
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Command Ops is good for BrikWars, but for me nothing’s going to top the
first-year Dragons Battle Chests, before the Dragons factions started getting
overdesigned and silly. Nothing but humans, orcs, and the craziest piles of
medieval hand weapons for a couple of bucks. Genius! Even the
fully-articulated Pyrates figure packs didn’t excite me as much. I already had
plenty of pirates and skellies, but orcs are something I’d wanted for years.
In lugnet.off-topic.clone-brands, Dave Schuler wrote:
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Not sure when you mean--can you be more specific? I have Mega Bloks
catalogs dating back to 1993, and they’ve never struck me as
deceptively similar,
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Now I’m wondering if I mixed up the brands on that one as well, I should be more
careful about shooting my mouth off. I got an informal presentation four years
ago about why it’s important to close the window curtains in Billund; I got to
see old Lego dealer catalogs next to clone catalogs that I thought I remembered
as being from Mega but now I’m not completely sure. Whichever company it was,
every page layout was identical, with the individual models built as similarly
as the clone company could manage with its less extensive selection of elements.
Lego’s been given plenty of cause for legitimate paranoia over the years.
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Thanks for making that distinction. I get frustrated when LEGO’s proponents
throw all clones onto the same “they’re rip-offs” pile, when in fact
there’s a wide range of brands with different strengths and weaknesses.
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Really, I don’t think the whole “rip-off” thing would be such a big deal if the
clones in general weren’t so prone to quality issues. The two stories I like to
tell are about a girl I dated in college who refused to touch Lego because she’d
had such a bad experience in high school trying to build with Mega Bloks, not
caring at all that the two brands weren’t related; and the call I got a few
years ago from an old friend up in Portland who was in a rage at Lego because
he’d tried to build some of the early big Dragons sets and all the “Lego” pieces
kept popping apart by themselves (I don’t know if the Dragons element quality
has improved since then, but I have plenty of those first- and second-year sets
myself, and I can tell you that it takes an act of God to get some of those
elements to stay together). That’s just two people right in my immediate circle
of friends who were once excited about construction bricks but dropped out of
the market because of bad experiences with clones (although in the second case I
was able to bring him back into the fold with a little work).
I can understand if Lego and Lego fans are frustrated by competitors poisoning
the market that way; I was certainly tearing my hair the couple of times I ran
into it, and I don’t think any clone brand right now is completely innocent of
releasing poorly-functioning elements in at least one or two of its themes. I’m
happy to point out some of the things that a couple of the clone companies are
doing that I think are really cool, but I think I still feel fine about lumping
them all together into the “they’re rip-offs” pile at least in that one regard.
I’ll still need to pick up some of the post-merger Best-Lock bricks to see how
much their quality’s improved, though.
(Not that it matters for the purposes of the story, but this time I am sure that
it was Mega Bloks in both cases, since I’d been determined to track down the
specific sets that’d given each of them trouble.)
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How sure are you that the LEGO minifig design is indeed trademarked and
protected as such?
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You can see their trademark notices for it here and there - the first one that
pops up in Google is at the bottom of the
Star Wars
video game site. In regards to the big BrikWars painting, the word I got back
in 2003 was as follows:
“The MINIFIGURE is an icon for LEGO Company, and it is a proptected trademark
in many countries world wide. We also have a copyright protection for the
MINIFIGURE in many countries world wide. We take very good care of the
MINIFIGURE, and we do not license our copyrights and or any trademarks rights to
it.”
Reading this again, I’m kind of interested to note that it sounds like it’s a
trademark in some places and a copyright in others (or maybe both at once
somehow?). I’d like to see a list of which countries get which status.
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Message is in Reply To:
 | | Re: Cobi/Best-Lock
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| (...) These sound like MB (URL) Command Ops> (Military) and Dragons (Fantasy) figs to me. I haven't seen studs on Bestlock figs' backs either. And I would heartily agree that Command Ops was just made for BrikWars. And and I can't say 'BrikWars' in (...) (17 years ago, 17-Jan-07, to lugnet.off-topic.clone-brands, FTX)
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