Link: Lego Prohibits Use of Product in Spinal Tap DVD – NYTimes.com
As final editing was being done on a concert DVD of the tour, which included footage from the video projected on stage, Lego declined to grant permission to use its figures, which are protected by copyright.“We love that our fans are so passionate and so creative with our products,” said Julie Stern, a spokeswoman for Lego Systems, the United States division of the Lego Group, a Danish company founded in the 1930s. “But it had some inappropriate language, and the tone wasn’t appropriate for our target audience of kids 6 to 12.”
Set aside for a moment the fact that Lego is being a copyright bully here, and legally, they don’t have a leg to stand on. What they’re doing is just bad branding. In their misguided attempt to protect their brand, Lego has completely lost sight of what their brand is actually all about. Is the Lego brand about protecting kids from heavy metal? Is it about only letting them do building projects that some corporation approves of? Of course not — when I buy my kids Lego instead of some talking Tinkerbell-branded crap, it’s because I want to help my kids be creative, even if what they come up with surprises me once in a while.
It’s too bad the guy didn’t use the Star Wars Lego figures too, then Lucas could have joined in the BS.
Yeah, but to be fair, Lucas has historically been very accommodating to usage like this (they could have objected to the “Troopers” video etc. but didn’t).
The video production company probably made the mistake of asking for permission from Lego, instead of just doing it.
That means that someone at Lego has to say, on paper, “Yes, this unauthorized commercial video using our copyrighted figures and containing obscenity is okay with the Lego Company.”
Not gonna happen. You wouldn’t sign that letter if you worked at Lego either. I certainly wouldn’t. It’s one thing to silently ignore fan-made material, it’s another to officially approve its unpaid use in commercial products that are well outside of the core Lego market.
Again, if they had made use of them without asking for permission I bet you any amount of money that Lego would not have pursued them for it.
It is not brain surgery to be clueful about this, and again, in a world in which Lucas has published explicit terms that permit its fans to mash up its content, you’d think that Lego, a system that’s created to let people create stuff, would have something similar.