That is so lame

Here's an answer to an e-mail I sent to Lego Customer Service on September 8th, after I had pointed out THIS Eurobricks thread:

"Dear David,

Thanks for getting in touch with us.

Thank you so much for letting us know and we would be more than happy to get this information forwarded on for you. We certainly don't want plagiarism to happen and I will make sure this is brought to someone’s attention right away.

Please get in touch if you need anything else. It's free to call our experts at 1-800-835-4386(Monday through Friday, 8am to 10pm and Saturday & Sunday 10am to 6pm EST) or you could go to www.LEGOshop.com. Happy building!

[First Name of TLG Employee]

LEGO Direct Consumer Services."

Yet, when you go to the Lego Technic Challenge voting page http://technic.lego.com/en-us/Competition/voting.aspx , the two plagiarised entries are still appearing there.

I'm pretty sure they just look the letter over and give it a premade response from a list of premade responses.

The two copykiddies were removed! Better slow than never

Also a blog entry:

Plagiarism at Septembers LEGO Technic Challenge.

Hi LEGO Technic fans

Plagiarism at Septembers LEGO Technic Challenge.

It has come to our attention, that two of the entries in the September LEGO Technic challenge are copies of other peoples work.

We have therefore removed these two models from the voting process this month.

The idea with the LEGO Technic Challenge is that you should challenge yourself to build something new. When we go through all the model entries every month we see a lot of cool creative models.

So let’s continue that positive spirit in the competition.

Edited September 23, 201014 yr by DLuders

The sad thing to me - completely apart from the plagiarism issue itself - is that the people at TLG who are responsible for the competition have little or no idea of what's going on in the AFOL community. Anyone with half an eye on what happens in the AFOL Technic community would recognize Mahjqa's MOC without the least difficulty. It was a nice gesture to get Conchas, Sariel and Blakbird involved in the Technic Blog, but just maybe it would be good to get some more collaboration and interaction with the Technic community than is the case right now.