Do not look to closely at this thumbnail. The photoshop is so bad. Hopefully it doesn’t look too bad when you click on it. I’m relying on the small size of thumbnails to cover up a multitude of sins. Before I started pushing and pulling pixels, the srouce images looked like this:
That’s a Blender render of falling bricks, and a hastily taken picture on my phone. Sometimes you just gotta do what you gotta do. Tubers gotta Yoube.
I am entirely willing to admit the duality of my message in this video. “I’m a huge fan of legos… I’m gonna destroy their brand if they don’t shape up.” But it’s not like both can’t be true. I can be a fan of something and still want it to be better. I don’t let my kids have ice cream every day, and I love them. I can’t say that I love legos. I’m not one of those blindly enthusiastic fans who feels that the brand can do no wrong. After all, there’s only a few slots in my heart for unconditional love, and I’ve got a wife and 6 kids, so there’s not a whole lot of room left.
But neither am I against LEGO. I still feel they have a lot to offer the world. However, as long as they insist on a one way relationship with their fans, from our pocketbooks to their bank accounts, this isn’t gonna work out. Just because we like something doesn’t mean we have to put up with abuse from it.
Never mind, the high minded ideal that ideas need to pass into public domain, and LEGO doesn’t have the legal right anymore. The funny thing is, if LEGO actually has very little legally. If they lose their brand to genericization, what exactly will they have left? Not the rights to the design, their patent has expired, and functional parts don’t get copyright. All they really have at this point is their trademark on their brand, logo, and minifigs, the copyright on their printed materials. So take away their trademark, and if everyone can call their knockoffs “lego bricks”, then will they have anything left?
Well, of course. They can still insure that people know that their official brand means quality. That’s the biggest argument against the big knockoff brands like Lepin, Bela, or Gudi. Even though these companies are providing people with what they really want (reviving sets discontinued and abandoned by LEGO) the blind fans will point out that if it’s not from LEGO, it’s not the same quality. So they’ll still have that. But it will be much harder if they can no longer associate that quality with the letter E, G, L, and O, arranged in a particular way.
I wonder if my attempts to genericize “legos” would even work, tho. Because in order for something to be genericized it has to pass into public consciousness as the reference for a type of product. Can that be done consciously? Can genericization be a choice? In other words, by me stating that I’m going to genericize “legos”, have I just defeated my own purpose? There’s a chance that this is the case. Then again, maybe it’s already happened. After all, when someone buys dollar store knockoffs of interlocking building bricks, do they say anything other than “Check out my legos!” Or “lego”. I don’t care. The point is made. Lego may have already lost their brand and I’m just bringing attention to it. Like they brought attention to my unfinished designs from so long ago by demanding they be taken down.
So, I guess, thank you Lego. Thank you again.
