Everything is NOT Awesome. A Lego Brick as a 3D Trade Mark

Abstract

This paper discusses the reasoning of the protection of the flagship Lego products – the rectangular brick and the Lego minifigure as the trade marks from the perspective of European Union trade mark system and the Polish legal system. The main part is dedicated to the most important absolute grounds for refusal of trade mark registration, i. e. the distinctive character and the shape of goods necessary to obtain a technical result. However, it is crucial to understand the history, especially the history of legal protection, of both the brick and the minifigure. In the end, the Lego case allows to draw general conclusions about the overlapping of different intellectual property protection regimes and the relation of public domain to the trade mark registration. All these considerations are presented with the use of both comparative and doctrinal method.