(I’ve heard, but cannot verify, that LEGO allowed their patent / copyright / whatever to lapse … or maybe it only lasted 25 years, IDK, I’m not a lawyer and my memory sucks.)
Yes, the original patents on the brick (and minifig, I think) design are long expired. I’m not sure if you even can renew after a certain length of time… Tim’s our resident legal expert, so…
Would there be anything wrong with a third party selling sets that are no longer available?
I mean, it’s still IP… would it be ok to start printing an out of print book without paying the author royalties?
Is it okay to make parts or sets that are no longer made or never were in production?
Who designed them? LEGO? Or AFOLs? It’s pretty crummy to take something off LEGO Ideas and produce it without paying the designer.
One last point, in response to the “frustrated lego builder” article, the people who resell sets don’t really decide how much the sets will sell for, supply and demand / the market does.
This, I agree with. While I am not comfortable with the utterly mercenary tactics of clearing shelves of desirable sets and sitting on them to sell later (i.e. once out of print) to folks who couldn’t buy at the time they were available, it’s still a free market, in that if someone’s crazy enough to spend thousands on a Green Grocer, it’s their money they’re flushing down the toilet… nobody’s forcing them to do that. Just like how people spend tons on a piece of cardboard with a baseball player’s photo on it… or at least, they did 20 years ago, dunno if that market still exists in the digital age.
For me, I’ve decided it’s ok to have a couple copies of certain on a shelf to resell later, but I’m trying not to make that a major investment strategy… and I’m not gonna go buy every copy of a big set I can get my hands on.
Reselling actual LEGO products, though, is vastly different from making knockoff versions of LEGO products, and also from making versions of sets designed with LEGO but by AFOLs.
Ultimately, Wheaton’s Law should be followed when dealing with all of the permutations of this line of thought.