Unfortunately this makes every Bricks and Minifigs store a risk to do business with, selling or buying. You're either supporting a criminal enterprise or risking being a victim of one.

"the crazy part to me is how blatant the executives of bricks and minifigs are in saying go ahead and try to sue us, we’ll drag this out "

To my experience this is a common strategy in disputes when the corporate party has people who operate as uncivilized brutes. I think it's part of the McKinseyfication of companies - profits at all cost - and here's the playbook.

My personal experience is from private parking control. Rather than be professional about my reclamation, their first response was "only criminals dispute these and we win all the court cases".

So I think trying to be imposing and villanous to scare the other non-corporate party to back off is a common global corporate playbook in situations in matters where companies enter contractual complex space with individuals.

Sign of the times. It's not enough to be rich and powerful, the goal is to be able to gloat about your impunity. Little Epsteins.

The police are right.

This is a dispute about who is the rightful owner of the Lego. That is a civil matter to be decided by the courts. Doesn't matter how clear the evidence, such disputes are for the courtroom.

The police are under no obligation to provide service to specific people or businesses, only the public in general. They don’t even have to say “This is a civil matter”, they could just say “Eh, this doesn’t interest us, good luck with that.”

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warren_v._District_of_Columbia

No, they came up with some legal theory in which they’d bought the assets of some company, including the company’s ownership of some art, but not obligations like paying royalties.

Perhaps:

“Authors Have Formed a Task Force Because Disney Refuses to Pay Them”

https://bookriot.com/disney-must-pay-task-force/

> Authors like Neil Gaiman have formed a task force to fight for the royalties Disney has refused to pay for Star Wars and other tie-in novels.

> just some shelf space

Unless the store owns its building and has too little inventory to cover the shelves, the cost of not filling the shelves with the right goods is quite serious. In a low-margin business like retail, "just some shelf space" reads almost like "just some gold bars".

Much better deal for a diamond ring than a giant kayak, then. Gotta pay rent to sit on the shelf!

It isn't - deprecation of held goods is always a risk and if you're working on consignment then that comes with weird financial liabilities. If there's a flood and you lose your inventory it sucks - if there's a flood and you lose an inventory of consigned values then suddenly you're potentially exposed to paying market value for a number of items in addition to all the site damage you'll need to address. Capacity is one aspect of the costs of holding inventory - but breakage is the much more expensive consideration and consignment just makes it even more expensive.

The original contract very specifically allows consignment. It's published.

So you "absolutely believe" something that was already proven false, and which you would know if you had even _skimmed_ the facts.

You clearly didn't read the article. The original franchisee's contract allows consignement.

There are a lot of reasons why you should never sell things through consignment - but one of those reasons is that the goods cease to be yours in several significant ways. If a company is able to sell a good they could sell that good to fulfill debts - if it is a route to liquidate goods to cover debts then it's in the scope of the liquidator (though I think in most cases a sane liquidator would return the goods whole to avoid creating more debt than already exists and destroying non-fungible goods). If we assume the consignment sale was advantageous for the seller it's unlikely there's a way for the liquidator to quickly sell the goods in bulk for a better margin than the consignment contract offered so any sale they executed would likely add more debt than it cured.

I saw an analysis from a lawyer who said that there are situations where a creditor can claim consignment items, but that it didn't apply here.

"Can't" is a really bad word to use and I am not certain if "they" here are the corporation or the liquidator.

If you're talking about the corporation I think that any sensible neutral party would probably come down on the side that the corporation has no entitlement to those goods.

If you're talking about the liquidator then the goods were held by the franchise so if it went through bankruptcy those goods would be under consideration by the steward - I think they'd usually find that the original owner should be entitled to the goods since they're relatively non-fungible. The proceeds from sold goods are likely a more complicated answer since money is fungible and divisible. I could accept that there would be scenarios where a steward would think that the corporation should recover a portion of the proceeds.

The court can do almost anything. Its happened before.

https://www.cozen.com/news-resources/publications/2020/is-yo...

I think if the consignor has not taken the correct steps then there is a risk the receiver would be able to pay other secured creditors using the consignors assets. For example if there are other creditors with liens on the inventory then you are meant to take steps to notify them of your claims on the consigned goods because otherwise the consigned goods could look like inventory to the secured creditor (https://www.lowenstein.com/news-insights/publications/articl...)