What Lego and Magna-Tiles Teach Us About Who Actually Owns an Idea

The Lego brick was British. The Magna-Tile was Japanese. Neither inventor got rich. Lego’s patents expired decades ago — it tried copyright in 1988 and trademark in 2005 to get them back, lost both, and is worth $12.6 billion anyway. What these two toys teach about the gap between inventing a thing and owning a thing.