LEGO Ideas

[CkMaxz]

Hi All,

Recently i read about LEGO Ideas House Rules. But i seems not quite get it as on the licensed section. As below

Please avoid projects based on brands that are licensed by our competitors.

We can’t guarantee we can produce your project if it is based on a competitive toy licensor– this is where all the legal stuff becomes complicated. We do not check all new project submissions for license conflicts as there are too many potential conflicts, but projects may be removed at any time if legal issues arise. To avoid this, you might want to do your own research for potential conflicts before submitting a project.

So i have a question here is, how do i know which can be used? For Example, Transformer can be used on Lego Ideas?

[Brickbuilder0937]

Transformers is a toy line designed and owned by Hasbro, a direct competitor with LEGO. There is no chance that LEGO could ever make sets for it. Other licenses, for example Pokèmon, are currently licensed to other building toy companies so LEGO won't consider them until the current maker drops the license.

[lordoflego]

The way I understand it and to put it in simple words: build and submit something from your head instead of from tv/book etc.....if someone else thought about it before-it's licensed so if you recognize something- it won't become a set...unless lego has that license...

[vynsane]

^ No, they don't ban licensed ideas outright, nor do they limit it to licenses already held by LEGO, they are explicitly stating that you cannot submit an idea based on an IP if that IP is already licensed by some other direct competitor company.

Minecraft, Back to the Future, Ghostbusters, The Big Bang Theory and WALL•E are all official Cuusoo/Ideas products that were based on intellectual properties that were not already licensed - by LEGO or any other company. If MegaBloks had the rights to any of those, it would be disallowed based on the rule stated in the original post above.

That said, I would love to see more non-IP based proposals get more attention, but for the most part the only ones that really gain traction are those based on a movie, TV show or videogame. The only original proposal that took off like lightning was Space Troopers (née "Marines") and that ended up being denied at the review stage.

[lordoflego]

I can't disagree with that vynsane, your examples of ideas sets are perfect, I just thought most things would be already licensed, only few can be used/produced.

[CkMaxz]

Wow... Then how can we check that which is licensed already by other company? I guess its quite hard rite?

So in other words for those licensed which have not on Toy making competitor we can use the idea rite? Sorry for bad english.

[vynsane]

^ Well, you can't be expected to know every license held by every competitor, that would be impossible.

I'm pretty sure that rule was added to the guidelines in conjunction with the pre-approval/moderation process. Before an Idea proposal goes live, it passes through a moderation process to determine if it is allowed based on those guidelines, and will be rejected if it doesn't pass them all. So that rule has two jobs:

• If you can determine/already know that the license for a particular IP is already held by a competitor and also know about that rule, you shouldn't submit it for moderation. This helps them reduce the amount of proposals that need to be moderated.
• If you can't determine if a license is already held by a competitor or don't know about that rule, they then reserve the right to reject a proposal if it doesn't meet the guideline specifications.

I have a feeling there is a great number more that fall under the second point above than the first.

[lego the hutt]

Like mentioned above, you can't be expected to know every license owned by a competitor. Ideas won't automatically reject a project as soon as it is submitted because of licensing conflicts. They tend to let it go and worry about those issues if it reaches its goal. Who knows, maybe in the year that it takes for the project to reach its goal the licensing restrictions will have changed.

That being said,it is pretty much a waste of time to submit a project that doesn't have a chance for approval because of licensing conflicts.

It is pretty easy to find out if there is a licensing conflict in most cases but there is always that grey area that is not public record. This includes specifics such as the duration of the license and costs that would be involved in acquiring it.

As an example, a current Ideas project that I believe has a licensing conflict is the Yellow Submarine project. I made a comment about it on the comments page. Knex produced a yellow submarine set in the last couple years. I believe they hold the license to produce beatles building block sets.

It is possible that the Knex license has expired and no one has picked it up. If that is the case the next question would likely be about whether the costs involved with acquiring that license would be cost efficient enough to attain just to produce one Ideas set.

Either way, licensing issues add an extra hurdle for any Ideas project to overcome.

To directly answer the OPs question, and reiterate what brickbuilder said about Transformers, that theme is not going to happen as a Lego set at this time.

[CkMaxz]

Thanks for all the comments and explanation. I understand clearly on this House Rules.

Appreciated for all of your time.