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'd try to protect that IP, since it probably wasn't their invention in the first place.
The designs that they show being copied by others are an interesting problem. I got bored of all the pictures and didn'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.
I'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's feasible to compete on quality, only price, which is a hard battle.
The designs that they show being copied by others are an interesting problem. I got bored of all the pictures and didn'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.
I'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's feasible to compete on quality, only price, which is a hard battle.