LUXEMBOURG - The Lego brick, one of the most instantly recognised toys in the world, was stripped of its trademark status by European judges yesterday.
The Danish toymaker's basic red plastic Lego 2x4 brick was literally the building block for a global toy industry success.
The brick's three-dimensional 2x4 shape was registered as an EU trademark in 1999. But then rival maker Mega Brands, which markets Mega Bloks, successfully appealed to the EU's trademark office, the Office of Harmonisation for the Internal Market (OHIM), to cancel Lego's trademark.
The OHIM agreed that a brick was just a functional, technical shape which could not be trademarked.
Yesterday, the European Court of First Instance agreed, rejecting Lego's application to get its trademark back.
Lego challenged the idea that functional shapes, such as a brick or any other "industrial design", were necessarily excluded from trademark protection.
Lego, claimed the company's lawyers, contained characteristics that set it apart, such as the design and size of the studs on top of the bricks. But the judges ruled that keeping the Lego trademark on the basic brick design created a monopoly on what amounted to a merely functional shape which was "necessary to obtain a technical result". The European court rejected Lego's claim that the company's competitors did not need to copy the shape of the Lego brick to achieve the same "technical solution". - ( PA)