Lego and Twitch, how could you???

In the last ten years, I have sadly reported many stories about the embarrassing madness of modern copyright, here and here. Follow those links, and you will find true horror stories that literally go from the Moon to comics stories, luxury chairs, Tolkien, Poirot and much more. This year, there already are (at least) two more horror stories to add to that sad list.

Metallica couldn’t play their own music

On February 19th or 20th, 2021, the Metallica band tried to play a live concert on the Twitch streaming platform. The automatic copyright violation filters promptly recognized that copyrighted material was being played, and so replaced it (remember: during the streaming of a live concert) with generic library music.

Lego punishes everybody who says lego

I just read on an italian newspaper that Thomas Panke is the owner of a toy shop in Frankfurt. On his popular Youtube channel, called “Held der Steine” (“Hero of the bricks”), he reviews everything you throw at him, as long as it’s built with those little plastic bricks that billions of people have been calling “lego” for decades now, whoever had made them.

This year Panke received from Lego’s lawyers a formal demand to not call “lego” anymore the equivalent, but cheaper bricks of some chinese competitors.

The same article reports that for similar reasons, another German toy seller, Thorsten Klahold, has been repeatedly sued by Lego for similar reasons, collecting (so far) 700 grams of threatening paperwork.

Fortunately, both of these “Lego makes a fool of itself” stories have ended (for now…) as they SHOULD end in a sane world, if a sane world could produce “intellectual property” regulations as dumb and abusive as those we have. Both Panke and Klahold reacted quickly and publicly. The former read the entire Lego complaint on YouTube, laughing, and gaining tens of thousands of subscribers.

Klahold, after doing the same on his youtube channel “Johnny’s World”, has started a campaign to demand that the term “lego” be liberalized, because it is now as common and generic as “jeep” is for off-road cars, kleenex for paper handkerchiefs, or excel for any spreadsheet software, or file.

P.S.: to know more about Lego clones, check the “March of the (Lego) clones” page, from which I got the images for this post.