
Kiddicraft, the Company Lego Ripped Off to Make Plastic Bricks (2014) - jacquesm
http://birthmoviesdeath.com/2014/02/06/kiddicraft-the-company-lego-ripped-off-to-make-plastic-bricks
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ig1
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...](http://www.powerhousemuseum.com/collection/database/?irn=108980)

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

~~~
ccvannorman
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.

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Luc
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.

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keithwhor
Kiddicraft -> Lego -> Infiniminer -> Minecraft

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

~~~
erik-n
Also, [http://www.lego.com/en-us/minecraft](http://www.lego.com/en-
us/minecraft)

~~~
zyxley
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.

~~~
DanBC
There's was Lego universe, but they wanted dong-detection.

[http://www.exquisitetweets.com/tweets?eids=SOlZp2L8I8.SOl4Cs...](http://www.exquisitetweets.com/tweets?eids=SOlZp2L8I8.SOl4CsO6YC.SOmhNAiuES.SOmlJ2T2Gq.SOmpjeGn1w.SOmwta15gX.SOmB4207kO.SOmJPgkOFU.SOmOl1j08a.SOmW0jPTRA.SOm72fKFfE.SOncwNl2SP.SOnlkgH05k.SOntnuAhGw.SOqg0uZR8K.SOqkXGJtbU.SOqrXBJruS)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9639249](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9639249)

~~~
zyxley
> This is a roundabout way of saying "never build an online game for kids / I
> have no idea how Minecraft hasn't been sued over this yet"

That's the basic problem of the MMO approach, rather than Minecraft's ad hoc
and persistent private servers.

~~~
bitJericho
Yep that's an awesome feature. I just don't let the young ones play online,
but if they want that group experience then the siblings can all play together
but not with the public. Pretty cool.

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jgrahamc
_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.

~~~
vidarh
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.

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

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9664174](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9664174)

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alkimie2
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
Both nations were signatories to Paris convention at the time, although IANAL
to tell if that particular product was covered.

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tarekkurdy
Proof that patents aren't everything.

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ekianjo
Another reason why patents are irrelevant.

