Is selling customised Lego bricks/minifigs legal?

[wingbliss]

Dear all,

Please pardon me if this has been posted, I tried searching through the forum for a long time, but found no direct results.

1) Is it legal that I buy original lego bricks and minifigs parts and used them as parts for my jewellery & other projects (e.g. photo frames) and later resell them?

2) Is selling of customised minifig legal?

Cos I am confused as why Mega-bloks and Best-Brick can win the lawsuit, but Coko loses.

I am a fan of lego and definitely will not support other third party.

Yours truly,

Colin

[davee123]

1) Is it legal that I buy original lego bricks and minifigs parts and used them as parts for my jewellery & other projects (e.g. photo frames) and later resell them?

2) Is selling of customised minifig legal?

It's illegal if you make them look "too much" like official LEGO products, or otherwise infringe on LEGO's copyright.

So, LEGO would have to demonstrate in court that your products were too much like their own product, or violated their copyrighted material. You probably DON'T look like an official LEGO product, so they most likely wouldn't win such a case to start with, and what's more, it's doubtful that they would care anyway.

They MIGHT come after you if they think you're getting too much market share that they would otherwise get (not likely), or if you're doing something offensive that they think might be damaging their reputation.

DaveE

[Randal]

I see people making custom figures all over the internet. Usually breaking other licenses... Like KISS minifigs, or superhero designs. I don't know how much trouble they get into, if any... probably none.

They must see that there's a market though, as they're now putting out their own collectible sets of highly detailed minifigs. I know I want them. =3

[tedbeard]

It's illegal if you make them look "too much" like official LEGO products, or otherwise infringe on LEGO's copyright.

I think you might be confusing the issue a little. The original question was regarding using LEGO elements as a material in a creation.

Using LEGO elements to make jewelry or book covers or portraits or furniture etc. is not an infringement of LEGO patents, trademarks or copyrights*. A disclaimer is a good idea to avoid any such claim but generally making something with LEGO elements and selling it is OK. Making the customer believe that they are buying a finished product created and sold by the LEGO Company is fraud.

*Note: Examples of infringement (keeping in mind I am not a lawyer - this is my understanding):

PATENT infringement would be to copy the stud and tube system if a legally valid patent is registered in your country.

TRADEMARK infringement would be to use the LEGO red-box with distinctive lettering on the item or it's packaging.

COPYRIGHT infringement would be to photocopy instruction manuals and sell them.

Hope this helps.

[Front]

If you want to do business like this in more that just a very small scale, I should think that I little more research than asking on a forum is needed.

My guess is that TLG may have a case against something like this.

[prateek]

There is a website that sells Lego jewelry and stuff, so I'm pretty sure that it's legal.

[Big Cam]

Of course it's legal.

it's like customizing a car and then re-selling that.

As long as you don't falsy advertise it as a LEGO original or something like that.

Just label it as it is, a LEGO fig customized by me.

[davee123]

Using LEGO elements to make jewelry or book covers or portraits or furniture etc. is not an infringement of LEGO patents, trademarks or copyrights*.

Using them, no. Selling them? Possibly. ... It's just that 99.99% of the time, it's probably not.

The issue isn't really with the patent that LEGO has on the system product, or the re-sale of physical LEGO products, but more in regards to their trademark, and their copyright. But it's certainly not patent infringement, that's true.

Say (for example) I decided to make a sexual aid out of LEGO bricks, with the LEGO studs (with their logo-displaying studs) prominently visible, and made it look like a licensed product with fancy-looking plastic packaging, and further used a similar-but-not-exact version of the LEGO logo. Effectively, the product is VERY INTENTIONALLY packaged to look like a LEGO product, similar to the digital camera that's currently on the market (which was done with LEGO's blessing). ... Except it's a sexual aid instead, which is probably morally offensive to many people.

Now, is that legal? Certainly arguable in court! And you can bet that if LEGO caught wind of that, they might try to make you stop-- either by forcing you to put a disclaimer on there, forcing you to change the packaging, the product, or the similar-looking logo, or just get you to stop all together. And I expect, it's possible that they could succeed in such a lawsuit, assuming that you did everything humanly possible to make it LOOK like a LEGO product, without directly violating their copyright, and refused to budge on any request that LEGO made.

The question of "is it legal?" is, unfortunately, a bad question, since this gets into things like copyright infringement and slander. There are probably a TON of products out there that COULD be forcibly removed from the market if certain copyright holders decided one day to go nuts and vehemently protect their copyright or their "good name". It's just that most of the time, companies don't care about small things like this, it would cost them lots of legal fees to pursue them, and there's a good chance they'd actually LOSE the court case in many instances, depending on the circumstances (since there's a lot of vagueries in there).

And just for clarity's sake, I'm pretty sure that's a reflection of US law-- internationally it could be a different story. There are countries with very loose (if extant) copyright/trademark regulations, where it'd be perfectly legal to go right ahead and slap the LEGO logo on your product.

DaveE

Edited May 20, 2010 by davee123