this post was submitted on 28 Feb 2024
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That‘s the thing with huge, shitty corporations. Even when they know they‘re absolutely in the wrong, they can still go after the small fishes and make their lives hell.
To give another example, LEGO has been flooding small toy sellers in Germany with cease and desist letters for selling sets from competitors that might look like knock-offs to some, but are perfectly legal because LEGO does not own the brick system. And of course they would never go after Amazon for doing the exact same. Only small sellers that are ruined if they can‘t scrape the money together for a proper legal defense.
Shouldn't it be unnecessary to spend on defense if there have been dozens of similar cases with the same result?
I mean not existing laws, just possible optimization against such kind of abuse.
Missing knowledge is probably the problem. Either from small sellers that don't know that they'll win, or from lawyers that don't offer to work pro bono for the same reason.
There have been cases where small sellers lost even though the really really shouldn‘t have by any means. But show a german judge in their 50s a gundam and a transformer and they‘ll say they look identical and it‘s plagiarism. LEGO being a huge name tends to win the most ridiculous cases here sadly.
OK, if in theory IP can be defended (I wouldn't agree still), in practice it just should be abolished (except for falsifying authorship being illegal).