LEGO, stop being jerks!

Alright, you probably notice that there are big blank 'picture unavailable' spots on the previous post. I had linked to FBTB's images, so I'm assuming that LEGO asked them to take down the images. I'm a generally law abiding type of guy, so I won't bother linking to the many many copies that have been posted to places like Brickshelf and Flickr, but it won't take you more than five seconds of searching to find them. On the other hand, I'm not going to bother linking to the images again when LEGO officially releases them.

LEGO, here's the thing. People like me, Will over at Brick Heroes, Ace at FBTB, Andrew and company at Brothers Brick, not to mention all of the non-LEGO-specific geek sites out there that have posted these are simply offering free advertising for your product. And we don't ask for anything - no fees, no thank you's, not even copies of the sets so that we can post reviews (though, you know, that would be nice). So by jerking us around you're just hurting people who are out their pushing your product.

And here's the stupid thing. These are surely going to be officially released in less than 48 hours. As I read the press release on ComicCon, today is supposed to be focused on the Turtles, tomorrow on the Hobbit, and Saturday on the Heroes lines. So it's not like you're preventing corporate espionage so that MegaBlox won't see the sets (one of the lame excuses we usually hear), or that you're trying to manage people's buying habits (the other lame excuse I've heard from LEGO reps is that if you release images of future sets too early, people will get excited about those sets that may not be available for six months and then will be less excited to buy the sets on the shelves right now - this excuse is obviated by the fact that you're going to release all of these images in the next few days anyway). It's also not that the images are preliminary and you want to wait until you have the final product to show off - that's a less lame excuse, but in this case these are the final product ready to be unveiled. No, it's simply so that you can manage a series of releases in the press, to have a cohesive 'story of the day' for each of the next few days. And this is your reason to jerk around the very people who a) buy your product and b) promote your product so that others will buy it.

Thanks, guys.