Kiddicraft, the Company Lego Ripped Off to Make Plastic Bricks (2014)

http://birthmoviesdeath.com/2014/02/06/kiddicraft-the-company-lego-ripped-off-to-make-plastic-bricks

by jacquesm • 11 years ago

94 29 11 years ago

Luc• 11 years ago

I wonder if the person who wrote this article understand patents, at all. I don't see any indication of that. He seems to be implying something untoward happened.

EDIT: I didn't see the comments before (they take a while to load) - the first comment on the article sums things up pretty well I think.

keithwhor• 11 years ago

Kiddicraft -> Lego -> Infiniminer -> Minecraft

Even if it's just in namesake, the world does have a funny way of coming full-circle.

erik-n• 11 years ago

Also, http://www.lego.com/en-us/minecraft

zyxley2• 11 years ago

I'm honestly surprised there's never been any sign of a "Minecraft: Lego Edition" (rather than the physical "Lego: Minecraft Edition"), with mechanics basically identical to Minecraft now except with all the terrain in-game made out of Lego blocks.

Buge• 11 years ago

Is there any source that Infiniminer is based off Lego?

PhasmaFelis2• 11 years ago

Except that Minecraft bears only a passing resemblance to Infiniminer, and has always credited its creator anyway.

ionwake2• 11 years ago

Incorrect

ionwake2• 11 years ago

I like the way we cross domains

ig1• 11 years ago

Kiddicraft was infact a variant of Minibrix[1]. None of these were "big-bang" inventions but rather a series of iterations that resulted in the bricks we have now.

[1] http://www.powerhousemuseum.com/collection/database/?irn=108...

Zigurd• 11 years ago

But without one of them hiring enough lawyers to end up looking the inventor, we'd have nothing. Right?

ccvannorman• 11 years ago

Thank God for patents, without them this invention clearly wouldn't have had the human willpower to do it at all.

But with patents, yay! A few aggressive apes got rich and everyone else got to play with the invention. Capitalism ROCKS.

ekianjo• 11 years ago

Another reason why patents are irrelevant.

tarekkurdy• 11 years ago

Proof that patents aren't everything.

alkimie2• 11 years ago

Patents are territorial. If the English guy did not bother to patent in Denmark (highly unlikely especially at that time) then Lego was perfectly free to use the design and build on it.

varjag• 11 years ago

Both nations were signatories to Paris convention at the time, although IANAL to tell if that particular product was covered.

jgrahamc• 11 years ago

Over the years they refined it - the official birth of what is really the modern Lego came in 1958, when they added the hollow tubes on the underside to help with interlocking -, but the design remains taken from Kiddicraft.

Seems like a pretty key fact. The hollow tubes are what makes Lego lock together so nicely.

vidarh2• 11 years ago

Even today, what makes Lego superior to their competitors (to the extent that e.g. eBay sellers take pains to guarantee their packs of random bricks contains nothing but genuine Lego...) is that the pieces are manufactured with surprising precision and have a lot of little details that most people aren't even aware of.

E.g. wonder why Lego Technic sets and similar uses a mix of black and grey connecting studs instead of just sticking to one? The grey ones will rotate more easily, so depending on whether you want to lock something in place or enable it to rotate more freely (e.g. wheel, rotor) you'll use different ones. If you look at them up close, this is achieved by tiny little ridges (fractions of a mm tall and fractions of a mm wide) on the black ones. There's also a slit in he black ones, not sure what if anything that makes a difference to.

Most non-Lego bricks lack a lot of those details, and that makes them less flexible to use.

thomasmarriott• 11 years ago

I thought 'no one is going to steal your idea'

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9664174

Kiddicraft, the Company Lego Ripped Off to Make Plastic Bricks (2014)

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