THE LEGAL PUZZLE THAT’S HARDER THAN RUBIK’S CUBE

The first Magic Cube, as it was originally called, was sold from a Budapest toy shop in 1975

The puzzle is made up of 26 miniature cubes. It was renamed Rubik’s Cube in 1980

The current world record−holder is Dutchman Mats Vilk, 20, who completed it in 4.74 seconds this week

A total of 350m Rubik’s Cubes have been sold

A Rubik’s Cube has 43,352,003,274,489,056,000 possible configurations. If you turned it once a second it would take you 1,400trillion years to get through them all

FOR most, the Rubik’s Cube is a baffling puzzle that seems impossible to solve.

There are competitions to set world records, with expert ‘speed-cubers’ striving to achieve ever-faster times.

But the legal puzzle over its trademark has been dragging on for years, and is putting the Rubik’s Cube in danger of being stripped of key protections.

It also threatens to put companies licensed to make the cube under threat from cheaper replicas – as well as Seven Towns, the UK firm that manages its intellectual property rights.

This week, EU judges will decide whether the trademark registration covering the cube’s three-dimensional shape should be cancelled. The case has wider ramifications, leading to worries that it will lead to a weakening of European intellectual property protections.

In May, one EU judge said the shape did not qualify for trademark protection. This followed a ten-year legal claim launched by German toymaker Simba. It wanted to import cheaper, unlicensed cubes from China, and called for Rubik’s Cube to be stripped of its trademark.

Nick Kounoupias, general adviser to the cube’s creator Erno Rubik, said: ‘We see this as an EU organisation trying to damage the rights of a UK organisation.’