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Subject: 
Re: is the lego group exploiting its user base?
Newsgroups: 
lugnet.robotics
Date: 
Sun, 31 Jan 1999 16:04:58 GMT
Original-From: 
Laurentino Martins <lmartins@marktest.pt=spamcake=>
Viewed: 
938 times
  
At 15:06 31-01-1999 Sunday , you wrote:
when i went to the official mindstorms site to sign up for my personal
section, i paused to read the legalese on the way in.  to my amazement,
i discovered that when you complete the sign-up you are agreeing to give
the lego group complete rights to do anything they want with any ideas,
designs, or programs you post there.  they are effectively taking
possession of anything you post!  now, given that the primary audience
for this site is kids that either won't read the legalese or won't
understand it if they do, it seems to me that the lego group is
massively exploiting their user base.  they have created a user base of
probably tens or hundreds of thousands of kids who are doing free r&d
for them.

a scenario: little johnny comes up with a really clever design and posts
it for his friends to see, and the next thing he knows his design has
been incorporated into the next ris expansion set.  now little johnny is
probably naive enough to just think "hey, that's cool! they liked my
idea!", but the rest of us realize that the lego group has stolen what
is legally his and is profiting from it.

to this point, the lego group has consistently impressed me with the
level of quality in everything they do.  but i think this is a really
bad thing they have done.

what do you think?


I think that something is going on with LEGO at several levels.

You are impressed with the quality of LEGO?
Let me show you a true case: In Portugal the CyberMaster CD was not translated to Portuguese like in the other countries of Europe were is was translated to their languages.
Now picture this scenario: A father buys the most expensive LEGO set to date - the 8482 CyberMaster - to it's kid to offer on Christmas, and surprise of the surprises, when the child opens it, it cannot understand a word of the animations or text the _interactive_ CD contains. Now picture the a father returning the set to the shop, with the child falling in tears because he was already used to the idea that it was going to make robots of it's own.

Second. Have anyone noticed that LEGO seems to be taking out of production some of the most beautiful TECHNIC sets of the market, only to replace them with more simple models that look as good but don't have half of the "stuff" in it?
I'm thinking in the Supercar 8880 and the Space Shuttle 8480.


Laurentino Martins

[mailto:lau@mail.telepac.pt]
[http://www.terravista.pt/Enseada/2808/]

--
Did you check the web site first?: http://www.crynwr.com/lego-robotics



Message has 1 Reply:
  Re: is the lego group exploiting its user base?
 
(...) They've done that loads of times in the past. It simply comes down to the fact that "new" sells goods, and something which has been around for 2 years will not sell to the existing customer base. Now, if they re-visited some of these items at (...) (26 years ago, 31-Jan-99, to lugnet.robotics)

Message is in Reply To:
  is the lego group exploiting its user base?
 
when i went to the official mindstorms site to sign up for my personal section, i paused to read the legalese on the way in. to my amazement, i discovered that when you complete the sign-up you are agreeing to give the lego group complete rights to (...) (26 years ago, 31-Jan-99, to lugnet.robotics)

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