IP: enlightened approach to intellectual property and product development

[David Farber <dave@farber.net>]

>Date: Wed, 12 Sep 2001 09:18:43 -0400
>To: farber@cis.upenn.edu
>From: Charles Brownstein <cbrownst@cnri.reston.va.us>
>
>
>from:
>http://news.lugnet.com/lego/announce/?n=40
>
>
>
>
>
>   LEGO Company / Official Announcements / 40
>39  |  41
>
>
>
>        Subject:
>               LEGO Company position on third-party programs for LEGO 
> MINDSTORMS
>          From:
>               "Tomas Clark" <tomas.clark@america.lego.com>
>               Tomas Clark
>     Newsgroups:
>               lugnet.lego.announce
>     Followup-To:
>               lugnet.lego.direct
>          Date:
>               Mon, 10 Sep 2001 23:04:36 GMT
>      Highlighted:
>               !! (details)
>
>
>View Raw
>Message
>
>
>
>    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
>
><snip> remainder of letter seeking creating clarification about what is 
>LEGO product and what is not
>--
>
>
>
>Charles N. Brownstein
>Executive Director, XIWT
>Suite 100, 1895 Preston White Dr,
>Reston, VA 20191
>
>email:  brownstein@cnri.reston.va.us
>tel:    703 620 8990    desk: 703 262 5346
>fax:    703 620 0913
>web:    <http://www.xiwt.org>



For archives see: http://www.interesting-people.org/