Subject:
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LEGO vs. MegaBloks
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Newsgroups:
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lugnet.mediawatch
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Date:
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Wed, 2 Mar 2005 18:43:53 GMT
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Viewed:
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2919 times
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From CBC Radio November 25, 2004
http://www.cbc.ca/thecurrent/2004/200411/20041125.html
Lego: Megabloks
For some, building walls is child's play. You may remember spending hours
stacking Lego blocks or Megabloks to make your own perfect worlds--full of
spaceships and castles.
Lego doesn't make a 'courthouse kit', but they might want to look into one.
Because now---at least in the legal departments at Lego and Megabloks----those
little bricks are forming legal walls between two toy makers in Canada. And it's
a fight heading all the way to the highest court in the land.
Next year, the Supreme Court will hear arguments on whether Megabloks has the
right to make and sell Lego-style toy bricks. Brahm Segal is the Vice President
of Business Development for Mega Bloks International. He was in Zurich.
We contacted Lego however, they declined to comment. In April of this year, The
Supreme Court of Canada granted the LEGO Company leave to appeal its case
against Mega Bloks Inc. At that time, Lego issued a press release which read:
"this decision gives LEGO Company an important opportunity to present its case
to the Supreme Court for protecting its world-famous LEGO® products. LEGO
Company welcomes fair competition, but is committed to protecting its
intellectual property rights and to safeguarding the public from imitations
which tend to cause confusion with consumers."
Trademarks & Toys
Customer confusion is the main building block of Lego's legal argument. It
doesn't want its customers--children really---to confuse its toy bricks with
Megabloks. Well, we decided to conduct a little "structural test" to see if kids
really know the difference between the two toys.
To talk about the implications of the Lego-Megabloks case we were joined by Myra
Tawfik. She is a law professor at the University of Windsor.
Lego Sues Factboard
Megabloks isn't the only company Lego has sued. In fact, the toy brick giant has
targeted a number of competitors in the courts.
Lego's patents ran out in the United States in 1983. That's when Tyco Toys
Incorporated began producing lines of building blocks that connected with
Lego-brand building blocks. Tyco's blocks were less expensive, and its
advertising directly attacked Lego with the slogans "If you can't tell the
difference, why pay the difference?" and "Tyco looks and acts like Lego blocks."
Lego sued on grounds of deceptive advertising. It asked a Federal court to order
Tyco to change the wording of its advertising and to quit using Lego's name.
Lego also claimed it held a common law trademark on its two by four inch
building block. A United States District Court sided with Lego on the
advertising issue, but, the United States Court of Appeals rejected Lego's
argument. The United States Supreme Court declined to hear Lego's appeal.
Another construction toy company, Best-Lock, has been sued by Lego in France,
Austria, Germany, Denmark, Holland, Spain, Great Britain, and Italy. Its legal
battle with Lego has cost Best-Lock one million dollars so far and has slowed
the company's growth.
In 2003 the LEGO Company won a lawsuit in Norway against the marketing group
Biltema for its sale of Coko products, on the grounds that the company used
product confusion for marketing purposes. And, last month, The LEGO Company won
a legal action at the Swedish Market Court in Stockholm against Biltema for the
marketing of Coko products.
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