I find that these third party groups don't have a big hand in how Hasbro will carve out its legacy. Copyright infringement in this way however does cross the line, on an ethical standpoint I have not supported iGear. However, if Hasbro were smart, they would incorporate these moderately successful groups by doing something like eHobby does, where it bears the Takara name but is clearly of the inspiration of other people. Takara's Springer, a production of FansProject. Limitted run Dirge, Ramjet and Thrust a production of iGear, a division of Hasbro. I don't think iGear is a very good company for many reasons already provided. Essentially they took a product which went through several resin molds, which invested in a professional designer as well as assumedly countless hours of research and development; and hijacked that work, modified it stole the design and repackaged it at a cost that justifies the build of a remake of the molds we are familiar with plus minor modifications to it. As tempting as the offer is, sorry iGear.
thats a great point, but hasbro/ takara is too thick headed to work with these companies. i hope they dont ruin it for all the others like fanproject if hasbro decides to crack down. but wow! these things look just like mp transformers. now we dont have to wait a year for 1 or 2 mp anymore. hell we can get maybe 10 of them in a year now. LOL!
That is just NOT going to work. Once a small group goes under the umbrella of a big corp things will change drastically. There will be no more freedom in design and everything will have to go through the bigger companies first. That is a big sacrifice for a fan company / group. Look at the Marauder Megatron Prototype. Nice design but got scrapped.
I'm willing to bet that this figure is different enough from the Takara MP mold that it dodges the copyright/patent infringement laws. It's what, 20% difference from original blueprints? This has a different head-nosecone design, wings, feet, waist IP laws are another story
Why do I feel a foreboding sense of dread and chaos coming from this news? Is this iGear's first entry in actual, fully transformable figures? Because if it is, it kinda shows. But that's just my opinion.
Don't worry. Everytime iGear throws out a picture of some ongoing project of theirs people will start over reacting. Take a couple of days for everything to cool down and back to normal. Routine stuff.
Also, if the Geely Ge has a legal right to exist: So do the igear coneheads (The above is a Chinese 'clone' rolls royce)
bicker bicker bicker... that all I see here outside of the few "WANTS!!" I saw through out the thread.. Everyone has the right to want or not want this piece.. I'm so shocked this topic hasn't been locked.. mods must be letting it run for the sheer laughter of it.. ON TOPIC!! I'm adding to the want list
Why do you figure he'll be $200? Prime was under $100, and they had to engineer the entire mold from scratch on that one. Given Faith Leader as the benchmark, this'll probably cost about the same as an official MP Seeker.
wahhh wahh somebody call these guys a wamublance, I love iGear (got me my botcon breakdown from them) and i love this design
let me point something out to you pseudo lawyers here. look up the case of Gibson USA vs ESP guitars. Gibson USA sued ESP for making what they called the EXP guitar, made most famous by James Hetfield of Metallica Gibson feeling this guitar was a threat to there sales and direct infringement of there design the Gibson Explorer Gibson won there suit and ESP had to stop making the exact copy of the Explorer and redesign there EXP this was the result The ESP EX. And as you can see ESP only had to make minor tweaks to the guitar to be in a legally safe zone for Gibson to not be able to sue them again, although any idiot could tell it was still pretty much the same guitar. So with that being said I feel there are enough tweaks to this design to keep it legally safe from total infringement and Hasbro's legal beating stick. If you want to see another case look at the Gibson les paul and ESP eclipse specifically the ESP KH3 that was also part of the lawsuit, very few changes to the body were made and the guitar was re-dubed the ESP EC and the redesign was and is totally legal now.
you guys seriously need to take a chill pill (if there is such) wow, my 1st post hello folks..........
Oh WOW! I want this. I want this so bad. I'm actually more excited for this than I have been for any TF in a while. But then I am something of an MP Seeker fanboy.
