Rubik's cube loses EU trademark

The makers of the Rubik's cube, the multicoloured puzzle that has baffled millions of people around the world, on Thursday lost a battle with the EU's top court to trademark its distinctive shape. The famed toy has been protected since 1999 under a European trademark that was registered by its British manufacturer, Seven Towns, covering "three dimensional puzzles".
But in a judgement almost as fiendishly difficult to unravel as the cube itself, the EU Court of Justice struck down the trademark for the Rubik's cube shape at the request of a German toymaker, Simba Toys. The issue at stake was not the shape of the puzzle but its inner workings - the "technical solution consisting of its rotating capacity" - and that that can only be patented, not trademarked, the court ruled. The cube, invented by Hungarian architecture and design professor Erno Rubik and first produced internationally in 1980, has six different coloured sides each with nine squares that have to be aligned correctly by rotating them.