Functional Shape and Three-Dimensional Trademarks: Four “Twin” Judgments of the EU General Court on the Rubik’s Cube

By four judgments delivered on the same day – Cases T-1170/23, T-1171/23, T-1172/23 and T-1173/23 – the General Court of the European Union definitively confirmed the invalidity of four EU three-dimensional trademarks, all owned by Spin Master Toys UK Ltd and all relating to variants of the well-known cube-shaped puzzle.

‍These decisions are substantially overlapping, both in their reasoning and in the solutions adopted, and may be read as a single coherent intervention on the issue of functional shape within EU trademark law, a topic we have previously addressed, for example, here.

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