LEPIN ordered to stop making and selling LEGO imitation products by Chinese court [News]

Earlier today, a district court in China ruled against four companies for infringing multiple LEGO copyrights by producing and distributing LEPIN-branded imitation products. The companies were ordered to “immediately cease producing, selling, exhibiting or in any way promoting the infringing products” and to pay LEGO 4.5 million RMB in damages (about $650,000 US).

The four companies, including Shantou Meizhi Model Co. among others, were held liable by the Guangzhou Yuexiu District Court for copying 18 specific LEGO sets and multiple minifigures in addition to “carrying out unfair competitive acts.” Niels B. Christiansen, CEO of the LEGO Group commented that the rulings “send a clear warning message to other companies who may be copying LEGO products,” and that the company will continue to “take all necessary legal actions to protect our intellectual property rights.”

The ruling is another significant legal victory for LEGO as the company continues to battle imitators in China. Last year, LEGO won a similar case against Bela Bricks for creating, distributing and selling imitation LEGO products. The rulings also provide precedent to continue pursuing many other clone brands who have tried shutting down and reopening with different names to avoid enforcement.

11 comments on “LEPIN ordered to stop making and selling LEGO imitation products by Chinese court [News]

  1. Derrick

    How far does this go?? For instance, is the brick concept itself a LEGO registered product ? What if the designs are originally those of these Chinese brands? What if I choose to make and sell sets of my own designs?

  2. Michael Wolf

    Holy Hell! Lepin is a huge company that has essentially been living free and easy off of LEGO IP. Even I’ve considered buying Lepin because they’re such good counterfeiters of LEGO. I had just assumed there was nothing that could be done about them. While I’m glad LEGO is getting justice those counterfeit sets seem like they’re 90% of the Lepin line. I don’t know how the company is going to bounce back from having almost the entirety of their inventory suddenly unsellable.

  3. Davit Mugalashvili

    As everyone understands – nothing will change. It will be “Lebin” or something instead of “Lepin”, the manufacturing sites will overnight move to a different location and all legal evidence that “Lepin” ever existed will be erased by the end of the week just to reemerge under the different name. It is China, and as it was said – “Somoza may be a son of a bitch, but he’s our son of a bitch”.

  4. Quentin Macleod

    It’s about time Lego takes a stand and does something about it.
    They don’t stamp Lego on their pieces for nothing, it’s to let people know Lego IS and always WILL BE Lego.

  5. Merrin

    @Derrick – the patent on the brick itself expired some years ago, so anyone can produce a building brick toy.

    The issue with these copy-cat products is that they rip off all the hard work and design that the real Lego designers do. I don’t think anything Lepin produce is an original design… or very little of what they sell anyway.

  6. Sonny Burnett

    I bought a few mini-figs of theirs to see…I figured they were making them in LEGO shops in China because they are spot on.

    Guess I should go out and buy the Millenium Falcon knock-off before they pull them all!

  7. Eliezer Andujar

    There’s a lot of people that do Mocs and the signs in their own houseT and some of them are amazing lepping Just needs to hire people like that internet Sensations YouTube Sensations that bild great things how many of you would love to be called by lepping to be one of their designers designing stuff new stuff a lot of us I know that

  8. Anthony Flynn

    “if” lepin ask designers who have had there products “knocked back” by lego then they can put those products out to sell… and lego do not have a LEG”O” stand on there are many products from designers ive seen on “other sites” that have been knocked back to purposly bought by lepin from designers

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