A cube is a cube is a cube is a cube …
Reprints
A rotating cube of many colors is just a cube and cannot be trademarked.
So ruled Europe’s top court this week, finding that the shape of the Rubik’s Cube is not sufficient to grant it protection against copycats, according to BBC News.
BBC reported that the British company Seven Towers, which manages the Rubik's Cube intellectual property rights, registered its three-dimensional shape as a European Union trademark in the 1990s.
Rubik's Cube was invented in 1974 by Hungarian sculptor and architecture professor Ernő Rubik.
In 2006, German company Simba Toys challenged the trademark protection, stating that the cube's ability to rotate should be protected by a patent and not a trademark, the BBC reported.
According to a similar piece in Reuters, patents generally permit inventors to block competitors from making commercial use of their inventions, while trademarks give intellectual property owners' an exclusive and perpetual right to their designs, logos, phrases or words.
In 2014 the European Union General Court decided the three-dimensional trademark was valid, and ordered Simba to pay costs. Simba Toys then took its case to the Luxembourg-based European Union Court of Justice, which agreed with Simba Toys' arguments in a decision that cannot be appealed.
