Lego – The ultimate leader

According to the latest ranking of favorite toy brands and licenses among 0-6 year olds, carried out by Brand Trends, the famous Danish building block mark jealously guards its position as leader in the EMEA zone (Europe, Africa, Middle East).
It is ahead of Disney, Marvel and Barbie.

This impressive longevity is of course due to a strong marketing strategy, but also to a well-established and long-standing intellectual property strategy.

Indeed, we forget it a little quickly but for many years Lego held a monopoly on its registered designs related to its bricks and characters.

Its strategy and influence in this area were so strong that, during the adoption of the Community Design Regulation in 2001, the Danish brand even succeeded in imposing on the European legislator the integration of a paragraph in Article 8 creating a protection exception for interconnection parts, still today called “the Lego clause“.

But the right conferred by a model expires after a maximum of 25 years, you might say! However, the original construction parts and some Lego characters are much older. True !

However, this does not put the Lego company in any difficulty. First of all, because it still has models in force on its most recent creations and secondly because, in some cases, it can take advantage of copyrights, of a much longer duration, and, in other cases, to take advantage of trademarks.

Indeed, Lego products have become so distinctive over time that they can be protected by trademark law, which is infinite as long as the trademark is renewed.

To illustrate this point, note that Lego owns no less than 270 trademarks and 942 designs in force in the European Union alone.

The colored bricks mark still has a lot of good days ahead of it and should not be dethroned soon.

– Philippe BOHLAND, Industrial Property Attorney and Partner at Mark & Law