Never let it be said that Lego doesn’t look after its friends — especially when those friends are as carefully chosen as Mia, Olivia, Emma, Andrea and Stephanie.
Anyone messing with them is going to be hit with a lawsuit, as three rival toy makers, angrily accused of copyright infringement, are learning already. And lest anyone think that this is merely a case of playful corporate handbags, the Danish family owned company is deadly serious. It has too much invested in its “Friends” line of toys — time, money, reputation — to be anything else.
Yesterday the US International Trade Commission said that it was launching an investigation into patent and copyright infringement allegations levelled by Lego against the three toy companies last month.
The range at the heart of Lego’s complaint is the Friends line, designed to appeal to girls and the subject of an expensive four-year research effort. The range features the aforementioned Mia and her pals, who inhabit the Lego toy world of Heartlake City. Kits aimed at six to twelve-year-olds give players the chance to build their own Friends Sunshine Ranch or Heartlake Shopping Mall.
At the forefront of modern feminist thinking they clearly are not, but for a company sometimes accused of being a boys-only business, making build-your-own “Ultra agents Mission HQ” and “Ewok Village” sets, reaching out to the rest of the world’s — and, in particular, America’s — youngsters is a big deal. According to Lego’s lawyers, in 2007, before the Friends range was introduced, only 9 per cent of the households it surveyed said that the primary Lego-player was a girl. In 2012, they say, having tested the Friends range with 3,500 girls and their parents, Lego launched Friends backed by a $40 million global marketing drive. That year, sales of the product were double initial forecasts.
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Cue those lawyers, who claim that products from the three rivals — LaRose, of New Jersey, Best-Lock Construction Toys, of Florida, and Mega Brands, of Canada — consist of figurines that bear a similarity to the Danish group’s toys and, therefore, infringe its patent. In a 52-page complaint, the lawyers at Day Pitneyfeature pictures of the ranges being challenged, which include Lite Brix Sunshine Island Mall, Blue Ribbon Ranch and Little Mermaid.
According to the publicly available documents on the commission’s website yesterday, only Mega Brands has responded, calling for the claim to be dismissed. The commission said that it would complete its investigation within 45 days.