As for why, my bet is to prevent "counterfeit" (as Lego would call them) lego parts being shipped by vendors. They target low-income countries, as it is profitable there to import China-made bricks and sell them on Bricklink to make a living.
As a background, there are plenty of chinese lego alternatives, operating mostly legally in the west as the lego patent has expired long ago. Brands such as Mouldking, Cobi, Bluebrixx, CaDa, etc. are available here in Germany even in retail stores and online, and it is perfectly legal to sell "alternative" bricks. Cobi itself manufactures all of its part in the EU (mostly Poland) and creates original designs (mostly War-themed models such as tanks, fighting jets etc. as Lego does not do those).
Our eldest daughter loves airliners and wanted a model of a particular type of plane earlier this year that we could only find as a Cobi model. I've always been a bit wary of Lego-alikes (principally because all of the ones that I saw growing up in the 80s and 90s were kind of crappy), but have no complaints with the quality of Cobi models - excellent instructions too. The cost was probably half, or less, of what a Lego equivalent - if there'd been one available - would have been as well.
Cobi's range of aircraft models is much broader than Lego as well so if you have a loved one who's into "Lego" and planes, they're a real winner. We've just bought our daughter another one of their aircraft models for Christmas.
IIRC lego had two actual patents: the basic brick, and the classic figure. The brick is expired while the figure isn't. Hence you can find "alternate" bricks, but not figures. They do own a shitload of trademarks, and aren't afraid to enforce them (which they legally must or they risk losing the TM).
Fun story: my wife ordered a couple of those "alternate" sets, and none inflicted on Legos patent nor TM (no lego branding, not a copy of a lego set, etc). The Swedish customs acted on their own (baffling to me) and stopped the package, sent her a letter in stark wording to accept forfeit. She challenged this, then Lego's lawyers got in contact with us and, using the figure patent, claimed this was a copy and we should forfeit or they would sue her. Very harsh letter, very stark wording.
Left a very bad taste in my mouth, haven't bought any Lego (or alternatives either) since.
There is jazz improvisation handbook "Harmony with Lego Bricks" written in the 1908's by Conrad Cork in the UK. It's pretty niche. Conrad approached Lego at the time and they gave him permission to use the Lego name. It's written "LEGO(R)" on the cover. Those were more innocent times I guess.
The patent expired, but the minifigs is also a EU 3D trademark. This is not possible for the brick which (only) serves a technical function, namely to hold on each other. Trademarks do not expire while in use. Another example for a 3D trademark, also in this US, is the Coca Cola bottle.
the minifigure is not patented, but protected by a 3D design mark. design marks don't expire, and attempts to challenge the mark and get it removed so far have not been successful.
LEGO is using design marks to protect all new bricks they create. design marks can just be registered without any review. but they can be challenged, and some of these challenges have been successful.
Is this conjecture or actually done? Bricklink Buyers expect Lego bricks, including the trademark on each stud, so any shop sending anything not produced by the Lego Group, but with the trademark on it, would be sending actual counterfeit products, not third party bricks.
Buying actual Lego bricks produced in whichever Lego factory and reselling them is not counterfeiting.
It is mere conjecture, I have no datapoints to support this. I would assume, since Bricklink sends worldwide, that you would not open a support case when buying a couple of $ worth of parts if they are non-original. The effort of return shippment probably not worth it. I could also imagine that you can buy china-manufactured parts that carry the lego logo.
i highly doubt that. i have never seen a counterfeit lego set with an actual lego logo. even in china that would not be legal. someone would have to specifically target bricklink shops to sell such bricks.
if you get fake bricks you might not open a support case to get the bricks replaced, but you would complain and report that shop. with enough reports coming in someone would look into that. so i feel that this is unlikely to happen. at the worst case it's someone clueless, mixing in alternative brands by accident. but i expect someone doing that intentionally would be shut down quickly by reputation only. i mean, shops get closed simply because they get to many complaints about taking to long to ship.
> i highly doubt that. i have never seen a counterfeit lego set with an actual lego logo
Individual bricks, though? Would you even know? I admit I have no knowledge here, but on the face of it adding the logo doesn't seem like a high bar.
(Question: do the legit brick manufacturers equal the quality of Lego? I picked up a Lego-compatible set years ago, and it didn't quite fit with Lego blocks (I'm assumming due to poorer tolerances)).
Looking at the list of countries, living in one, and knowing how much the west is cracking down on money control. This reeks of anti-money laundering controls.
How would a criminal enterprise use Bricklink to launder money? Buy expensive Lego sets with dirty dollars, and sell them locally for clean money? There's certainly an opportunity for arbitrage there, but it sounds awfully complicated for a money laundering scheme.
Not being sarcastic, just curious whether there's something special about Lego or whether they're just passing along the restrictions imposed by their payment processor.
I worked on a product based on micropayment transactions - most less than a dollar, and we supported tenths of a cent - and money laundering was a constant concern.
The baddies out there are numerous, dedicated, highly adaptable, and willing to throw mass volume at a small % opportunity.
The overall premise is that they order someone who has no real way of knowing if a transaction is a ruse or not to stop doing transactions if they're a ruse. This doesn't work so the entity ordered to do it gets yelled at unless they do a bunch of stuff that negatively impacts innocent people, at which point it still doesn't work but now they've checked their compliance box.
>To put this into perspective, the total combined population of these countries exceed 2.5 billion, or just about 30% of Earth’s population which is wild.
Doesn't look like anybody can make 35% of their revenue from those countries though, does it.
Sure, but sellers in those countries found the service to be very valuable. The framing of this situation as being beneficial to the cooperation and detrimental to the consumer feeds the narrative of the Evil Corporation, which is sad.
It's really unfortunate that LEGO acquired Bricklink, and then did this, but it's such a common storyline.
Make no mistake: Lego makes a great product but they are an evil corporation. They have been so from the day they started making bricks (they stole the design, the marketing content and even the boxes), they continued when they sued everybody and their dog for doing the same thing that they themselves did, only much worse, and finally they did it again when they acquired Bricklink and started merging accounts with the Lego website. And probably many times in between when they created incompatibilities between older and newer sets just to drive sales.
Isn't compatibility a huge part of the draw of Lego?
I've never heard of incompatibilities, what are they?
The only problem I've noticed product wise is there are now mold defects after they started adding recycled plastic, only one or two minor (visual surface) imperfections per box, but before, there were none.
I wonder what the story behind this action is? It's surprisingly short to the shutdown, and they seem to indicate they wanted to keep those markets open, as otherwise I feel like they wouldn't falsely give people hope they might open it up again:
> We will review this decision regularly, and we hope to be able to reopen the BrickLink Marketplace to LEGO® fans in these countries in the future.
Shutting it down in (almost) the entire South America doesn't feel like it makes financial sense, can't be such a small market that it wouldn't be worth keeping it open.
Some really big/rich markets on the list (Brazil, India, ME..).
I don't think LEGO is big in most of those countries (at least not in India), so they might be trying to slow down the secondary market in order to grow sales for new products.
I've been a member for 25 years (yikes, since it was Brickbay) - I'm not sure why Lego company wouldn't have the resources to handle this compared to the prior smaller company.
Watching Held der Steine cured me of all notions that LEGO(R) still has any interest other than milking their brand/reputation. McKinsey leadership will do that to a company, I guess.
Thankfully there's many good (and compatible) competitors now, that get you much more bang for the buck. I'm not that deep into LEGO(R), but it feels they have already lost a substantial portion of goodwill in the power user community, which may be contagious. I certainly wouldn't buy or recommend it to anyone anymore (except used perhaps).
> Six years ago, I wrote that it was a terrible idea for LEGO to acquire Bricklink and revisiting some of my thoughts I expressed then, it sure seems like there’s some dodgy stuff happening behind the scenes.
> To be fair, I acknowledge that there may be compliance challenges operating in some of these countries, where things like local laws, logistics, import restrictions etc may make it difficult for LEGO/Bricklink to do their business there, but surely there could’ve been a better way to communicate this, or invite community feedback instead of turning the whole site off in 2 weeks.
Bricklink was acquired from the mother of the guy (who died) that started it by some asian 'entrepreneur' who then turned around and sold it to Lego, whose only long term interest always was shutting it down. The secondary market hurts their sales for new sets, or so they believe.
Why the scare quotes for 'entrepreneur'? From what I can tell, the purchaser was a legitimate and very successful software publisher, one of the richest men in South Korea. Furthermore, he ran the site for 6 years before selling it to Lego, actively developing new features like the free Studio design software. It sounds like he only sold it due to personal financial issues after a failed software deal [0].
I agree that Lego owning BrickLink created a big conflict of interests but there doesn't seem to be anything shady about how they acquired it.
> The secondary market hurts their sales for new sets, or so they believe.
I think the secondary market drives sales. People need to believe that the overpriced sets they are purchasing, never open, and stash in the attic will make them a fortune on the secondary market one day.
Even if there were significant challenges in some countries, certainly other countries on this list didn't deserve the 2 week treatment. Lego's actions here are very sketchy.
"We appreciate your understanding, - The BrickLink Team"
Understanding of what? They didn't describe the situation that lead to their decision to unilaterally apply the same treatment to all of these countries.
Corpspeak should be illegal. It so pisses me off that companies always harm your interests while telling you it is to serve you better. Clearly it's not, stop lying.
It’s very close on their quality IMHO. Miles better on the value. I bought a Lumibricks set this year, after decades of buying Lego.
The set design (Cafe) was nice and it makes a good display piece. I liked their build techniques and integrated lights. The individual bricks were clean and with good color uniformity. But after a life of building Lego sets, I was able to quickly tell that tactile forces for connecting pieces were different to Lego. I will buy more of their sets, but I will keep buying Lego too.
> Ole Kirk Christiansen and his son Godtfred became aware of the Kiddicraft brick after examining a sample, and possibly drawings, given to them by the British supplier of the first injection moulding machine they had purchased. Realising their potential, Ole copied the Kiddicraft brick and in 1949 marketed his own version, The Automatic Binding Brick, that became the Lego brick in 1953.
As a background, there are plenty of chinese lego alternatives, operating mostly legally in the west as the lego patent has expired long ago. Brands such as Mouldking, Cobi, Bluebrixx, CaDa, etc. are available here in Germany even in retail stores and online, and it is perfectly legal to sell "alternative" bricks. Cobi itself manufactures all of its part in the EU (mostly Poland) and creates original designs (mostly War-themed models such as tanks, fighting jets etc. as Lego does not do those).
Our eldest daughter loves airliners and wanted a model of a particular type of plane earlier this year that we could only find as a Cobi model. I've always been a bit wary of Lego-alikes (principally because all of the ones that I saw growing up in the 80s and 90s were kind of crappy), but have no complaints with the quality of Cobi models - excellent instructions too. The cost was probably half, or less, of what a Lego equivalent - if there'd been one available - would have been as well.
Cobi's range of aircraft models is much broader than Lego as well so if you have a loved one who's into "Lego" and planes, they're a real winner. We've just bought our daughter another one of their aircraft models for Christmas.
Fun story: my wife ordered a couple of those "alternate" sets, and none inflicted on Legos patent nor TM (no lego branding, not a copy of a lego set, etc). The Swedish customs acted on their own (baffling to me) and stopped the package, sent her a letter in stark wording to accept forfeit. She challenged this, then Lego's lawyers got in contact with us and, using the figure patent, claimed this was a copy and we should forfeit or they would sue her. Very harsh letter, very stark wording.
Left a very bad taste in my mouth, haven't bought any Lego (or alternatives either) since.
Or are they doing a pharma and have repatented a small variation, or the European equivalent is still going?
Or is it actually trademark that is being enforced here?
[1] https://www.chaillot.com/ip-news/validity-of-3d-trademarks-f...
LEGO is using design marks to protect all new bricks they create. design marks can just be registered without any review. but they can be challenged, and some of these challenges have been successful.
Buying actual Lego bricks produced in whichever Lego factory and reselling them is not counterfeiting.
if you get fake bricks you might not open a support case to get the bricks replaced, but you would complain and report that shop. with enough reports coming in someone would look into that. so i feel that this is unlikely to happen. at the worst case it's someone clueless, mixing in alternative brands by accident. but i expect someone doing that intentionally would be shut down quickly by reputation only. i mean, shops get closed simply because they get to many complaints about taking to long to ship.
Individual bricks, though? Would you even know? I admit I have no knowledge here, but on the face of it adding the logo doesn't seem like a high bar.
(Question: do the legit brick manufacturers equal the quality of Lego? I picked up a Lego-compatible set years ago, and it didn't quite fit with Lego blocks (I'm assumming due to poorer tolerances)).
Not being sarcastic, just curious whether there's something special about Lego or whether they're just passing along the restrictions imposed by their payment processor.
The baddies out there are numerous, dedicated, highly adaptable, and willing to throw mass volume at a small % opportunity.
The vendor's money would be "clean" from an outsider's perspective.
AML laws aren't required to make sense in order to be enforced. Their effectiveness is basically zero:
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/25741292.2020.1...
The overall premise is that they order someone who has no real way of knowing if a transaction is a ruse or not to stop doing transactions if they're a ruse. This doesn't work so the entity ordered to do it gets yelled at unless they do a bunch of stuff that negatively impacts innocent people, at which point it still doesn't work but now they've checked their compliance box.
>We don’t currently have the resources to support Marketplace operations in these areas at the same level as everywhere else,” the statement reads
https://www.brickfanatics.com/lego-is-closing-bricklink-in-3...
Doesn't look like anybody can make 35% of their revenue from those countries though, does it.
It's really unfortunate that LEGO acquired Bricklink, and then did this, but it's such a common storyline.
Isn't compatibility a huge part of the draw of Lego?
I've never heard of incompatibilities, what are they?
The only problem I've noticed product wise is there are now mold defects after they started adding recycled plastic, only one or two minor (visual surface) imperfections per box, but before, there were none.
Tons of e-ink spilled over it and some never recovered.
Lots of those pieces look like technics, but aren't.
> We will review this decision regularly, and we hope to be able to reopen the BrickLink Marketplace to LEGO® fans in these countries in the future.
Shutting it down in (almost) the entire South America doesn't feel like it makes financial sense, can't be such a small market that it wouldn't be worth keeping it open.
Is anyone finding relevant political or regulatory patterns in the country list ?
Direct link to the list: https://www.bricklink.com/help.asp?helpID=2687
I don't think LEGO is big in most of those countries (at least not in India), so they might be trying to slow down the secondary market in order to grow sales for new products.
Thankfully there's many good (and compatible) competitors now, that get you much more bang for the buck. I'm not that deep into LEGO(R), but it feels they have already lost a substantial portion of goodwill in the power user community, which may be contagious. I certainly wouldn't buy or recommend it to anyone anymore (except used perhaps).
> Six years ago, I wrote that it was a terrible idea for LEGO to acquire Bricklink and revisiting some of my thoughts I expressed then, it sure seems like there’s some dodgy stuff happening behind the scenes.
> To be fair, I acknowledge that there may be compliance challenges operating in some of these countries, where things like local laws, logistics, import restrictions etc may make it difficult for LEGO/Bricklink to do their business there, but surely there could’ve been a better way to communicate this, or invite community feedback instead of turning the whole site off in 2 weeks.
I agree that Lego owning BrickLink created a big conflict of interests but there doesn't seem to be anything shady about how they acquired it.
0: https://pulse.mk.co.kr/news/english/9084691
I think the secondary market drives sales. People need to believe that the overpriced sets they are purchasing, never open, and stash in the attic will make them a fortune on the secondary market one day.
"We appreciate your understanding, - The BrickLink Team"
Understanding of what? They didn't describe the situation that lead to their decision to unilaterally apply the same treatment to all of these countries.
The set design (Cafe) was nice and it makes a good display piece. I liked their build techniques and integrated lights. The individual bricks were clean and with good color uniformity. But after a life of building Lego sets, I was able to quickly tell that tactile forces for connecting pieces were different to Lego. I will buy more of their sets, but I will keep buying Lego too.
> Ole Kirk Christiansen and his son Godtfred became aware of the Kiddicraft brick after examining a sample, and possibly drawings, given to them by the British supplier of the first injection moulding machine they had purchased. Realising their potential, Ole copied the Kiddicraft brick and in 1949 marketed his own version, The Automatic Binding Brick, that became the Lego brick in 1953.