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LEGO celebrated the 50th anniversary of its first Danish patent on Monday. I grew up playing with a few tubs of LEGO – the basic blocks and some trays, no kits!

BusinessWeek posted a nice slideshow of LEGO’s manufacturing process. The company produces 19 billion LEGO bricks each year with very high quality standards: only 18 of every 1 million bricks is defective.

That’s 36,000 bricks each minute, and  more than 2 million an hour, according to Neatorama.

PopAndCo.com has a cute flash animation of the process. The audio track is loud, however.
LEGO is moving most of its brick manufacturing from Denmark to Mexico and the Czech Republic, according to the New York Times. US manufacturing and distribution is being moved to Mexican outsourcing firm Flextronics, according to this report.

In September 2007, SupplyChainDigest published a good report about how LEGO management came to this decision. Earlier attempts to fix the company’s value chain had helped, but outsourcing was a step the company was reluctant to take. LEGO toys are an important symbol in European lives.

On BoingBoing, an editor created a timelapse video while he built a 5000-piece, US$500 kit of the Millennium Falcon.

As a final note, the Wikipedia entry for LEGO closes with a brief discussion of the trademark.

Peter Calveley (via Boing Boing) reported last week that the United States Patent and Trademark Office has finally struck down Amazon’s overly broad patent for one-click online shopping.

In an earlier post, Calveley described how Amazon had submitted 32 Wikipedia articles as supporting evidence for its patent claim. The discussion becomes hilarious as Calveley mocks the fungible nature of Wikiality, noting that the USPTO had removed Wikipedia from its list of acceptable references in 2006.

I found some poems today on PlagiarismToday, a blog that discusses content theft and copyright issues.MBA students don’t need to know this information, but we will discuss intellectual property law in a few weeks. It is relevant to an information systems course.Anything that helps students remember the basics - short of tattooing - is welcome. 

• Copyright law
• Patent law
• Trademark law

Tech: Feature Article: Bill Gates is kicking himself - he could have bought the patents years ago. “Acacia claims to own patents that cover virtually every aspect of transferring digitally encoded media from a server to a customer. A few examples: the downloading of songs to computers and MP3 players such as Apple’s iPod, the streaming of video to a PC, the digital distribution of motion pictures to hotel rooms, even the use of a TiVo digital video recorder. ”