Xref: lugnet.com lugnet.lego.announce:40 Newsgroups: lugnet.lego.announce Path: lugnet.com!lugnet From: "Tomas Clark" <tomas.clark@america.lego.com> X-Real-Life-Name: Tomas Clark Subject: LEGO Company position on third-party programs for LEGO MINDSTORMS Content-Type: text/plain; charset=iso-8859-1 Followup-To: lugnet.lego.direct Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit X-Nntp-Gateway: http://www.lugnet.com/news/post/ Organization: LEGO Direct Message-ID: <GJGyro.Ln4@lugnet.com> X-Http-User-Agent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.5; Windows NT 5.0) X-Nntp-Posting-Host: lugnet.com Date: Mon, 10 Sep 2001 23:04:36 GMT X-Http-Remote-Addr: 12.42.242.199 Lines: 164 This is an announcement regarding robotics and LEGO MINDSTORMS. Since the recent article from Business 2.0, we have heard many questions about LEGO trademarks, programs like LegOS, reverse engineering, and so forth. Hopefully the following statement from the LEGO MINDSTORMS team will answer these. Please follow-up in lugnet.robotics or to fairplay@legomindstorms.com. ------------ Clarification from the LEGO(R) MINDSTORMStm team Those of you who have read or heard about the recent article on LEGO MINDSTORMS in Business 2.0 may be wondering what our position is regarding third-party programs such as LegOS. Truth be told, we were also somewhat surprised by the article, which doesn't really represent our views and misquotes several LEGO employees. So here's the deal: the LEGO Company does not have a problem with people writing their own software and code meant for use with LEGO MINDSTORMS products. In fact, exactly the opposite -- we absolutely love what people have done to extend the possibilities of LEGO MINDSTORMS. Taking something apart, putting it back together, making it into your own creation that does what you want it to do -- this is what LEGO is all about! We feel very strongly that extensions and modifications by independent programmers have made LEGO MINDSTORMS a much better product. We'd like more people to be aware of the tremendous possibilities of the RCX brick and all the great work people in the global LEGO MINDSTORMS community have done -- tools like NQC, pbForth, LegOS, etc. In fact, we recently decided that we wanted to add a links page to the official LEGO MINDSTORMS Web site, highlighting the different third-party programs and tools out there. This new proposed page, along with some reorganization in the LEGO MINDSTORMS team, prompted a close look at the company's relationship to third-party programs. If we wanted to link to non-official software, what kind of disclaimer did we need? We discussed what we wanted to do with our legal team: the sites we wanted to link to, and the various third-party programs, applications, and operating systems available on the net. The point of concern that came up was not the development or distribution of these programs, but the use of our trademarks in some program names. Again, not a problem with the programs themselves, or with hacking LEGO MINDSTORMS software and hardware in general. To be absolutely clear: we have never sued, are not suing, and do not contemplate suing anyone for taking apart LEGO MINDSTORMS and writing their own code to extend the product, or for distributing that code for free. Trademarks can be diluted -- and therefore decline in value -- if they are frequently used in connection with products and services that are not created or authorized by the trademark-holding company. If trademarks become diluted, the company no longer has any reason to create more products that bear those marks. As a result, there are certain words that we absolutely must protect for the sake of our business and the future of LEGO products. These words are our trademarks: LEGO, MINDSTORMS, RCX, and Robotics Invention System (RIS). Many enthusiasts and observers on sites like Lugnet and Slashdot have recognized that there are very good reasons why have to limit the use of these words. If we don't defend these trademarks, there's a chance that we could lose them in the future -- because trademark owners are required to supervise the creation of products bearing the trademark. There's also a possibility for confusion in some people's minds about whether a program that uses these trademarks is an official LEGO product, whether the company is responsible for its performance and support, etc. For these reasons we have now asked and will continue to ask that the authors using these trademarks in the names of programs, operating systems, etc. change the names in all future versions. We're not asking that all existing copies of the software be renamed, or anything extreme like that; we simply ask that you not use our trademarks in the name of your programs, just as we ask that you abide by the Fair Play Policy posted on our site (http://www.lego.com/info/printfairplay.asp) when using our trademarks on Web sites. Below is a copy of the letter that we are sending out to the authors mentioned above. Note that LegOS is one of these programs -- although we are aware that it can be split into "Leg" and "Operating System," the similarity between "LegOS" and "LEGO," considering LegOS is designed to work with LEGO products, is simply too great to ignore. Note also that there are many names out there in the community which do not infringe on trademarks at all: pbFORTH, Gordon's Brick Programmer, etc. We sincerely hope that all of these programs, operating systems, and other third-party tools continue to be developed and used, and that a change of names is not too great an inconvenience for the contributors and authors of the few programs, which are affected. Thanks for your understanding and support -- and your contributions to an excellent system of robotics. We invite replies to this post, or inquiries via e-mail at fairplay@legomindstorms.com. Also, please feel free to repost this message in other appropriate forums, mailing lists, etc. -- you can help spread the word about our policy on naming and the reasons for it. ------------ From: LEGO MINDSTORMS Date: Fri, 07 Sep 2001 18:06:20 -0400 To: [author] Subject: A message from the LEGO MINDSTORMS team Dear [author], We wanted to let you know that we're working on a new page for the official LEGOŽ MINDSTORMS(tm) website (www.legomindstorms.com): a list of "hacker links" to resources around the web for advanced users of LEGO MINDSTORMS. Naturally, we'd like to include a link to your site. The list is sure to generate a lot of traffic and will be at the core of an important section on our site. As you know, LEGO tries to protect its trademarks vigilantly. Keeping an eye on our trademarks reduces that chance that the public will be deceived by products that are not created by the LEGO Group and greatly helps us to prevent counterfeiting. With strong trademarks, we can maintain the internal company support necessary to help the LEGO MINDSTORMS line continue to thrive and grow. We've seen a number of software applications for use with LEGO MINDSTORMS that use our trademarks in their names. Although we are pretty sure that neither you nor any of the other software authors are trying to fool people into thinking that your software is an official LEGO product, we still have to protect our trademarks strongly. If we don't, there's a chance that LEGO could one day lose its right to protect those trademarks against the real counterfeiters. That's the way the legal world works. To get to the point, we must ask that the authors of these applications migrate to new names that do not use our trademarks and, therefore, do not] violate our Fair Play policy (http://www.lego.com/info/fairplay.asp). The trademarks that cannot be used include the following words: LEGO MINDSTORMS RCX Robotics Invention System We greatly value the contribution that all the LEGO MINDSTORMS software authors out there have made to the LEGO MINDSTORMS community, and again, we're not accusing anyone of malicious wrongdoing; it's just a matter of a few words that have to stay off-limits for the greater good of the survival of LEGO MINDSTORMS. Here are some examples of names that are perfectly fine: NQC Mind Control BotCode Brick Programmer Bot-Kit pbFORTH (aka Programmable Brick FORTH) Gordon's Brick Programmer WebSpirit RoboRemote We do realize that some of the software applications which do include our trademarks in their names are in wide circulation and would be difficult to remove from all the sites that are distributing them. Therefore, while it is preferable, we are not asking that you try to rename or remove all the older versions of your applications that are out there! We only ask that you rename the current and future versions that you distribute, and that you make a good faith effort to get the renamed applications into circulation. We appreciate your support and your understanding. If you have any questions, we invite you to contact us at the email address below. The LEGO MINDSTORMS team fairplay@legomindstorms.com
Xref: lugnet.com lugnet.lego.direct:3301 Newsgroups: lugnet.lego.direct Path: lugnet.com!lugnet From: "Tomas Clark" <tomas.clark@america.lego.com> X-Real-Life-Name: Tomas Clark Subject: Re: LEGO Company position on third-party programs for LEGO MINDSTORMS Content-Type: text/plain; charset=iso-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit X-Nntp-Gateway: http://www.lugnet.com/news/post/ Organization: LEGO Direct Message-ID: <GKDpLq.FGp@lugnet.com> References: <GJGyro.Ln4@lugnet.com> X-Http-User-Agent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.5; Windows NT 5.0) X-Nntp-Posting-Host: lugnet.com Date: Fri, 28 Sep 2001 15:27:26 GMT X-Http-Remote-Addr: 12.42.242.199 Lines: 14 The magazine Business 2.0 recently published an article on the LEGO Company, hackers, and our position on development of alternative software and operating systems for the LEGO MINDSTORMS product. At the request of the Paul Keegan, the author of the article, regarding the semantics of our response (see http://news.lugnet.com/lego/announce/?n=40) to that article, we are providing a clarification. We wrote that "the article misquotes several LEGO employees." Though LEGO employees may not have been directly misquoted in the story, we do believe strongly that employee comments were taken out of context and reported in a misleading fashion. Our Company position, which unequivocally supports the hacker community in its contributions to LEGO MINDSTORMS, remains unchanged. Tomas Clark Producer, LEGO Direct