L'Ego My Trade-Mark! Mega Blocks to Protection: Lego and the Functionality Doctrine Revisited
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The goal of this paper is to test and stretch the bounds of the doctrine specifically as it applies to the ubiquitous Lego brick (the upper surface of the Lego brick in particular). More to the point, I aim to show that the Canadian Courts have misapplied the functionality doctrine in Kirkbi AG v. Ritvik Holdings Inc. in denying common law trademark rights to the upper surface of the Lego brick. Indeed, this paper has had a somewhat convoluted and ambitious history, and I have been forced to re-consider that view several times during its formulation. Nonetheless, I will still attempt to show that the Courts have, respectfully, mis-applied the law as it applies to the functionality of the Lego indicia in particular. I will focus on the Canadian jurisprudence on the matter and critically examine the bases for the doctrine as they apply to that indicia.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.008 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it