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So a dude and his wife decided to make accessories for Lego people to make them look like Sci-fi warriors, Post-apocalyptic, WW2, gangsters, Medieval, Fantasy, Ancient, etc. and sell them. They also made a game up that seems to be a gladiatorial arena called Chains to Champs for 2-6 players and has cards and dice to play. I thought maybe some brickheads here may want to take a look at the site or people could go all nostalgic...
Brick Warriors!
On the one hand, from someone who grew up buying Lego sets every time he scrounged up spare cash, COOL!!
On the other, not sure how this stands on copyright and stuff. Hopefully they're not crossing any lines! Hate to see this shut down due to a misunderstanding.
Lego can only own copyright in their specific expression. If you don't duplicate their pictures and designs exactly, they have nothing to say about it. For example, a specific face on a round head designed by somebody at Lego and copyrighted by Lego is Lego's property. A face on the same dimension head that YOU designed from scratch from your own imagination is YOUR property.
There are many companies out there that make lego-compatible products. They likely feel they do not need Lego's permission to do so, due to various legal precedents set by Lego's various failed lawsuits. I am not an expert in this particular case, but from what I understand, though Lego did patent its first bricks in 1958, they have only successfully sued another company in one or two cases. This is because both Canadian and European courts have ruled that the Lego "design" merely serves a function for holding one brick to another and so its Trademark in unenforceable. Similarly, companied like Megablocks have been given legal standing to go ahead with their businesses. Now, Trademark and Patent are two different things, but maybe Lego does not think it is worth it to keep throwing money at the problem, because they seem to be tolerating several companies' competing products.
Some of those competing companies are even selling Lego-compatible toys with licensing from organizations like Major League Baseball, no less (see here).
Now that the legalese is put away, I have to say I love these warrior bits! Very cool stuff!
They had me at the sight of the Mass Effect parts.