Creations For Charity 2025 is underway

You may wish to fix the heading of the article.

This has somehow slipped under my radar in the past, but looks like a great idea with some really interesting models. I look forward to see what's submitted in the oncoming weeks.

I wish the campaign the best of luck in their fundraising efforts.

As someone who actually received one of the original Frog Pods at Brickworld Chicago, the UCS version is highly amusing. For those who have never been to BWC, the late Arthur Gugick once filled an entire large PAB cup with black scorpions, and told everyone who would listen how they could be stacked, rotated into a spiral, and would make great architectural details. He also won Brickworld Master that year.

The following year, he brought them back, having decided that they didn’t work as well as he’d expected. And he slipped them onto peoples’ layouts to get rid of them. Simon Liu was attending for the first time that year, and he happened to win Brickworld Master that year.

The year after that, tiny spaceships piloted by frogs appeared all over the exhibit hall, and a tradition was born.

Help me out here, I am genuinely wondering about this - I checked out the buyable models, because I would like to support this effort; but some of these models seem questionably legal. I see Fabuland-MOCs, Final Fantasy MOCs, Assassin's Creed-MOCs and Batman-MOCs and I'm probably missing a few, because the pervasive thought is "what the hell, guy?".

Are we really picking fights with juggernaut companies just to raise money for charity? I like the narrative, I just don't fancy our odds.

I always love seeing the creativity come out for this, and there’s some really cool stuff this year. Particularly love “the fold” album that’s signed by them, that’s awesome. Can never get my head around the prices tho, I understand Mocs go for a higher price and it’s for charity. But $70 for that 6 legged crab droid is a bit insane.

@Crux:
In the US, at least, it really depends on the money. For instance, I could make a MOC based on any IP under the sun, post pictures for people to freely view, and there isn’t a court that would convict me of IP infringement as long as I hadn’t made any money doing so. It’s not enough to merely step on someone else’s IP, until you start earning money off of doing so. At that point, you’ve caused monetary harm, and you’re on shaky ground at best.

Paramount famously (infamously?) blitzed the internet with Cease & Desist letters when they wanted to set up a subscription based Star Trek site and make all the monies off of all the internet fandoms. If they succeeded in forcing any fan sites to shut down beforehand, it was only because the owners of those sites didn’t know their rights, or didn’t feel like they could afford the financial burden of fighting the case to conclusion (Paramount’s site flopped harder than a soccer player, BTW).

Lucas, on the other hand, encouraged people to make SW fan films (as long as they didn’t try to monetize them), and even helped some of them get published on physical media (I have a couple on sanctioned DVDs, at least one of which was attached to the cover of a major magazine). He also let people make and sell SW-inspired merch, as long as they were discreet about it. One person made Jedi robes, but was smart enough to to market them as such, or mention any obviously trademarked words on their site. Someone else was not, and got contacted by Lucasfilm lawyers.

In this case, the creators aren’t making one red cent off the sale of these items, so they may be in a legally defensible position. However, many of these creations are one-off designs, so there’s simply not enough money involved to even be worth having a permanent staff lawyer file suit. And even if that wouldn’t stop them, the optics of suing a charity of this nature over this should make even The Mouse take pause.

Compare this to Bricklink’s former MOC Shop program, where the listing of IP-infringing creations was strictly prohibited, but at least half of the content was exactly that, and BL would blow off any observers who pointed out even the most obvious of trademark violations. Only the trademark owner could submit for removal, and the money involved apparently wasn’t enough for them to feel it was worth slogging through all the listings to compile a list of offenders. I think TLG shut that down because they have much deeper pockets, and are a more enticing target for litigation, and recognized that the only effective and affordable way to weed out all the IP violations in the MOC Shop was to clear cut the field and salt the earth. Bricklink staff were pushing it as a way to increase revenue, but the amount it generated would be a rounding error to TLG.

@Goujon:
If you don’t build MOCs, or you only build them from your existing collection, it’s easy to underestimate how expensive it can get. Most of the cars I build run in the range of 200pcs, which would be a $20 set. Before I started buying larger quantities of parts to form a “car kit” that I could build from, I was buying exactly what I needed to complete each car and nothing more. Costs ran around $50 per car, with about half of that amount being spent on shipping. One in particular even ran to $150 because the piece count is significantly higher, the color scheme didn’t match my existing collection at all, and I needed such a weird array of parts that I was sometimes placing orders to get just one lot from an overseas seller. It’s easy to compare these to sets and the ten cents per piece rule, but there may be rare parts that cost $5 each.

And that’s just cost. If you want to actually sell your MOCs, you’re probably going to want to make some money while you’re at it. When there are people who are willing to compile multiple copies of a set to sell, there will also be people with more money than talent who are equally willing to throw that money at getting highly detailed models that appeal to them.