<story><title>Starting a physical product company? You’re gonna need a lawyer</title><url>https://medium.com/@molson_hart/starting-a-physical-product-company-youre-gonna-need-a-lawyer-13b2eecebc9f</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>jimmyswimmy</author><text>I read this article expecting to hear about potential liability concerns, not IP protection. It seems to me that I remember playing with a toy quite like theirs as a child many years ago. Basically cheap poker chips with cuts around the edge so they can connect. So it seems quite unlikely that they&amp;#x27;d try to protect that IP, since it probably wasn&amp;#x27;t their invention in the first place.&lt;p&gt;The designs that they show being copied by others are an interesting problem. I got bored of all the pictures and didn&amp;#x27;t compare one by one, but it seems like if you were to do a clean room design of a helicopter made of these snowflake chips, it would be legitimate to copy. I would guess they are suing this other company based on the copyright protection of their instruction manuals. Seems hard.&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;m quite glad my interests for developing products involve a healthy amount of algorithms rather than just pieces of plastic and instruction manuals. Success breeds competition, and in something like this I doubt it&amp;#x27;s feasible to compete on quality, only price, which is a hard battle.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>TeMPOraL</author><text>&amp;gt; &lt;i&gt;It seems to me that I remember playing with a toy quite like theirs as a child many years ago. Basically cheap poker chips with cuts around the edge so they can connect.&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;The concept definitely isn&amp;#x27;t new. Back in the 1990s, in Poland we had such &amp;quot;chips with cuts around the edge&amp;quot; added to bags of chips. See e.g. [0] or just search for &amp;quot;Star Wars Tazo&amp;quot;. These were themed and intended to be collectibles, but they had these tiny cuts into their sides and we absolutely did use them for small construction projects.&lt;p&gt;--&lt;p&gt;[0] - &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;allegro.pl&amp;#x2F;oferta&amp;#x2F;zestaw-15-tazo-tazos-lays-star-wars-gwiezdne-wojny-7818241421&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;allegro.pl&amp;#x2F;oferta&amp;#x2F;zestaw-15-tazo-tazos-lays-star-war...&lt;/a&gt;</text></comment>
<story><title>Starting a physical product company? You’re gonna need a lawyer</title><url>https://medium.com/@molson_hart/starting-a-physical-product-company-youre-gonna-need-a-lawyer-13b2eecebc9f</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>jimmyswimmy</author><text>I read this article expecting to hear about potential liability concerns, not IP protection. It seems to me that I remember playing with a toy quite like theirs as a child many years ago. Basically cheap poker chips with cuts around the edge so they can connect. So it seems quite unlikely that they&amp;#x27;d try to protect that IP, since it probably wasn&amp;#x27;t their invention in the first place.&lt;p&gt;The designs that they show being copied by others are an interesting problem. I got bored of all the pictures and didn&amp;#x27;t compare one by one, but it seems like if you were to do a clean room design of a helicopter made of these snowflake chips, it would be legitimate to copy. I would guess they are suing this other company based on the copyright protection of their instruction manuals. Seems hard.&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;m quite glad my interests for developing products involve a healthy amount of algorithms rather than just pieces of plastic and instruction manuals. Success breeds competition, and in something like this I doubt it&amp;#x27;s feasible to compete on quality, only price, which is a hard battle.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>hackerfromthefu</author><text>That was my first though on seeing the article also .. the chutzpah of writing the article like people are copying them .. when the presenting item is clearly a copy of existing children&amp;#x27;s toys from before. Then to hear this is a lawyer spruiking IP business .. stopped reading after that honestly</text></comment>