In order to further protect its renowed brand, the LEGO company will start selling its sets under the cover of an End-User License Agreement. While no official announcement has been made yet, the news has been confirmed on a well-known european fan community site, which makes it a certainty.
The agreement is supposedly going to be prepended to building instructions, so that the buyer has no choice but to read it before building the sets. Set boxes seals will also state the user must accept the licence before breaking them to open the set. Various online sellers have regarded the move as positive, as this will allow them to added another classification of new sets: in addition of “new”, “mint”, “mint in box”, “mint in sealed box”, sellers will now have the possibility to extort more money from buyers by selling “mint in end-user-agreement-seals-sealed box” sets.
Amongst other things, the agreement will prevent the user from usual things such as copying, reverse engineering or disassembling; but it will also cover more specific topics such as glueing, swallowing, vacuum cleaning or melting. Orienting studs in unconventional directions will also be prohibited unless explicitely allowed by the user’s man… erm, building instructions.
One anonymous leaksperson of the LEGO company was quoted as saying:It’s already in there, actually. Current sets already prohibit users from building on grass - or is it carpet, I never know for sure -, from opening bags in the wrong order, and so on. So what we’ll do is just extend this to more stuff. We would have done it already if the icons for what we want to add had been drawn already. The one about not combining our bricks with other brands was particularly hard to illustrate.
The new EULA icons can be found in the building instructions for set 7745 - Secret World Police Headquarters, which are already available as a PDF document from LEGO’s website even though the set will only be released beginning 2010.