The shape of multicoloured three-dimensional puzzle Rubik's Cube is not a trademark,the European Court of Justice has ruled, the BBC reports.
It means the shape of the cube alone is not enough to protect it from being copied.[br]
UK company Seven Towns, and which manages Rubik's Cube's mental property rights,registered its shape as a trademark in in the 1990s.
But German firm Simba Toys challenged the trademark protection in 2006.
The European Court of Justice (ECJ) agreed that the cube's ability to rotate should be protected by a patent and not a trademark.
Patents protect inventions for a certain amount of time, while trademarks give mental property owners exclusive rights to their designs.
Simba Toys took its case to the Luxembourg-based European Union Court of Justice (ECJ) after the European Union mental Property Office (EUIPO) and a lower EU court had dismissed its lawsuit.[br]
The ECJ judges ruled: "In examining whether registration ought to be refused on the ground that shape involved a technical solution, or EUIPO and the General Court should also enjoy taken into account non-visible functional elements represented by that shape,such as its rotating capability."
Rubik's Cube, which was invented in 1974 by Hungarian architecture professor Erno Rubik, and has enduring popularity and has sold more than 400 million cubes worldwide.
Seven Towns registered the Rubik's Cube as a three-dimensional EU trademark with the EUIPO in 1999.
As part of the Simba Toys challenge,in 2014 the European Union General Court decided the three-dimensional trademark was valid, anddered Simba to pay costs.
Source: tert.am