Who among us has not – in our teenage years – had to deal with the ‘magic’ Rubik’s cube, a puzzle that challenges many people’s skills of logic, analysis and synthesis? Few were able to solve it in seconds.

The Cube’s history now spans more than fifty years.

It all stemmed from the obsession of a Hungarian architect and professor, Erno Rubik, who, working on a three-dimensional model of movement to show to his students, after months of trial and error with blocks of cubes made of wood and paper, held together by glue and small adhesive strips, came up with a prototype of the so-called Magic Cube.
What is impressive about the magic cube, according to its creator, is not the object itself, but the following it has had, influencing more than one generation, and according to various sources as of January 2024 around 500 millions cubes had been sold worldwide, making it the world’s bestselling puzzle game and bestselling toy.

In 2020, the Canadian company Spin Master Toys Corp. bought the rights to the cube for USD 50 million from its UK subsidiary and initiated a rather aggressive IPR protection policy on the cube, relying, among other things, on European Union trademark registrations already obtained on the cube’s three- or two-dimensional shape, in various colour combinations, and taking action against companies marketing allegedly counterfeit toys.

The choice of the 3-D trade mark may be understandable for an object whose shape has, over the years, become eminently recognisable and which, therefore, could enjoy the protection afforded to registered trademarks, which is much more solid than that of the design/model.
However, it is well known that the EU system, among others, imposes limitations on registering a shape as a trademark, specifically when those limitations are related to the shape’s own technical function.

It is precisely this juxtaposition of needs that was at the center of the decisions of the EU General Court  on 9 July 2025, in case T-1170 of 2023.

This ruling immediately attracted my attention as, a few years ago, I was involved, on behalf of an Italian client, in a dispute against Spin Master Toys, for an alleged infringement of the aforementioned EU trademarks on the cube’s shape (the dispute was later settled).

The judgment of the EU General Court stems from four applications to declare invalid EU trademarks concerning the cube, in various colour variations, filed by the Spanish company Verdes Innovation. The question of law centred on the limitation in Article 7(1)(e)(ii) of Regulation EUTM 207/2009 (since replaced by Regulation (EU) 2017/1001, which prohibited the registration as a trademark of signs consisting exclusively of the shape of goods necessary to obtain a technical result.

The EU General Court, in its reasoning, first of all, emphasises that the purpose of the rule is to avoid potentially perpetual exclusivity on the technical or functional aspects of a shape. Accordingly, in trademark applications concerning a shape, it is crucial, more than in other cases, to identify the essential characteristics of the trademark, then assessing, on a case-by-case basis, their possible functional/technical or purely decorative value.
Nor, according to the Court, can the limitation in Article 7 be circumvented just because a feature of the shape also has aesthetic or decorative value, if that feature is, above all, technical.
To identify the product in this case, the Court adopted the definition used by both the EUIPO Board of Appeal and the EU Court of Justice in a similar 2019 precedent. This definition described it as a “toy consisting of the completion of a three-dimensional, coloured, cube-shaped puzzle, generating six surfaces of different colours”.
The Court, in particular, rejected the argument that the six-colour differentiation of the various faces of the cube (and of the individual bricks) was sufficient to escape the prohibition of Article 7, considering even this feature to have a primarily functional purpose.

The Court therefore ruled for the annulment of the contested trademark.
This decision, although not final, is consistent with a ruling of the same kind made by the EU Court of Justice in 2019 for very similar reasons.
It remains to be seen whether, despite such failures, Spin Master will continue to be convinced of the validity of the cube shape as a three-dimensional trademark, appealing again to the Court of Justice, or whether it will realise that the protection of the shape as a trademark remains, like the Cube, a real “puzzle”.